Thana-Nana Thaana-Nana: Ennai Thaalata Varuvaalo

It is the 2nd year of my B.E degree and I had just started working on my GRE wordlist. It was in this wordlist that I first came upon the word 'ubiquitous'. My way of remembering these complex words is to come up with a sentence of my own using some incidents or things that I can easily relate to. And it is no surprise that I associated this word to the song "Ennai Thaalata Varuvaalo" at that time. The penetration of this song at that time was so deep at that time there was not a place where this song could not be heard. Local tea shops, town & city buses, hostels had this song blasting out at every possible occasion. The image that I get when I hear the song these days is the walk that I had to take from my 2nd year hostel to the college mess. In my college, the 2nd year hostel is located farthest from the mess and we need to travel through the 3rd year hostel and go between the 1st & 4th year hostel blocks to reach the mess. During a 2 to 3 month period, not a day passed without hearing this song during that walk from my hostel to the mess. Invariably, one of the hostel blocks had this song playing from their tape recorders.

The greatest compliment to this song is that I never seem to get bored of it. Many songs regularly find a place in my winamp 'Repeat' list but only a few songs retain their flavor even after years of repeated listening. Vijay appearing in different T-shirts and the scene of Vijay kicking a piece of twig will always remain etched in my memory along with the days of walking through the hostel blocks with my plate towards the college mess. Some memories like these are forever engraved in our minds like beautiful idols on the facade of a majestic temple.

According To Me: Greatest Book Ever

I have this list of top 100 books (fiction & non-fiction) that I got from a website. My search these days - to a small extent atleast - consist of searching for these books in libraries and old book shops. I suddenly got this question on what is the greatest book that I have read till now & what would be the best book that I would read in my lifetime?

I somehow feel that 'life' on earth and the interactions of people would be the greatest book that I will ever get to read. All the books (the literal ones) that I have read till now & will be reading in the future seems to me to be just a preparation for me to understand this beautiful book of life that God has written for all of us to read, learn and understand. I am sure that my friend who is a bigtime movie buff would have also realized that the most astounding piece of movie that he ever gets to watch would be the great play called life that the director God plays out for each of us. May be it is God's way of training each of us to understand life in our own sweet terms. My intuition says that there would come a point in my life when I should throw away all my books(hard & soft copies) and start immersing myself in this 'life' book; for that is where my greatest learning would come from.

Change is the only constant thing!

It's time for me to reinvent myself & my blog. If lack of time was one of the reasons for neglecting my blog for sometime, lack of motivation is the more serious problem that I had to address to keep the blog going. To drive these out, I am planning on writing on two new topics (New for me!!!). Apart from the fact that these topics occupy less of my time, it is the fact that they are close to my heart that makes these new things all the more interesting for me and makes me take these up.

101 thoughts/ideas flow through my mind everyday and still I am not doing a great job in capturing these random thoughts in paper/blog. Under the topic "According To Me" (ATM in short), I am planning on scribbling those thoughts for people to comment and debate. What will this 'According To Me' have? From descriptions of the idlies of Madurai to the idiosyncrasies of life, from Karl Marx to Kamasutra, from rocket science to Royal Challengers, anything that captures my mind for a fleeting second and makes me think will find its way into this space. If you are looking for some great ideas then this is not the place for you! I am looking forward to creating some heated arguments through these topics. After all, I am an "Argumentative Indian" with a love for controversies.

Music plays a very important part in my life. From listening to almost all the new releases (In Tamil, of course) to tracking down & listening to not-so-popular hit numbers of Ilayaraaja, not a day passes without having some music playing. There are some songs that capture our imaginations and transport us to a different phase our life reminding us of the times (good & bad) that we have passed. Anytime we hear those songs, they take us through a nostalgic trip to a different place & time. It could either be the carefree, fun-filled days of our childhood, the unrecoverable & immutable lovely college days or the hard working days in front of the computer at office. Each one of us have our own set of such songs & through "Thana-Nana Thaana-Nana", I plan to fine-tune my thoughts on such songs. Do not expect any technical analysis of the songs for I am below the level of a novice when it comes to identifying raagas and instruments. These articles would just be limited to how I feel on hearing these songs and the places to which they transport me to.

As usual, I expect your comments and suggestions on ways to improve my blog, my writing and ultimately my inner self.