Saturday, March 22, 2008

Holi Hai Bhai Holi Hai !!


I simply love this festival of colours! And many thanks to my wonderful and enthusiastic bunch of friends that this holi became special to me :-). I played after ages...last time I played "proper" holi was when I was a kid (when I used to be in Mumbai..oh I miss "Bombay" terribly on all festivals). It has always been rather dull out here in Bangalore. Not even once did we play when we were doing engineering...and even this time around, it seemed unlikely!

Just one year after engineering and the number of my friends who are single has come down quite a bit..and due to this, it has become quite tough to get people together and celebrate festivals. But I was kind of adamant that we celebrate holi...till last night it looked very very very unlikely and lo..at about 10:30 pm we got the entire plan in place and we were all set to have a blast today!

Reached Madhu's place at about 11 am. Aravind, Madhu and I spent 20 minutes shopping for colours, "pichkari", etc. We looked around for water balloons, but didnt find :-( ..but guess we didn't need them afterall...3-4 buckets were more than sufficient. Initially we were 4 of us. It was super duper fun just putting colors on each other, filling up buckets of water, mixing color in it and emptying it out completely on someone...dancing and singing the famous holi songs....pichkari fights..oh, lot of fun! It was especially fun putting colors on Dodo..she kept saying "What dirty colours...I don't like orange..I don't like green...no purple...dirty yello...give me pink..pink and pink..." No wonder people always associate pink with girls..bad Dodo :-D Nevertheless, we put on her all the colors she hated...she kept running to wash her face every 15-20 minutes...hahaha!!

Madhu was shivering like crazy all throughout..we even managed to make him sit on the ground and empty out around 2 buckets of colored water on him...good fun! and then ofcourse, he didn't leave any of us! Tired of just playing with each other, we were waiting for some other bakra..that came in the form of Neo...we waited for him....waited to pounce on him the moment he landed..and that we did...proud to say that in a very uncouth manner we smeared him with all possible colours, poured buckets of water on him and didn't give him a chance to attack us :-D But as always he was a sport!

Finally, it was time to end the celebrations...and the time to start the effort of getting the colors off..which is the toughest part of holi ;-) It took about 30-40 minutes of dedicated effort to get rid of 95% color...5% still remains on me..hoping to get rid of it in the next couple of days...

This celebration culminated with a sumptuous lunch at Pizza Hut, where Deepika joined us. And we then did what we do best..chatting !

It was finally time to say our ta-tas...quite some distance back home, close to 18 km :-) [Call me crazy if you will, travelled that far just to play holi ;-) ]

Will definitely remember this holi for a long time. Now I know one thing for sure, it does not matter how many friends you meet up with, its the quality of the time spent together that matters in the end! Its best not to expect everyone to take part..just have fun with alteast those who have managed to make it!

Holi Hai !! Heres wishing you a Very Happy Holi !! Pics with Dodo and Ara...guys, pl upload them and send the link.

Sunday, March 16, 2008

Activities of LinuxChix !!

So LinuxChix is making forays into more and more colleges. The awareness is increasing quite rapidly now..thanks to the effort of sooo many volunteers ! We recently had a session @FOSSkriti @IITK, one at Gnunify 08, Lala Lajpat Rai College (Mumbai), Abida Inamdar College for Women (Pune). More to follow... Join us today and make a difference :-) For more information, herez our wiki.

In Mumbai Waiting for a Miracle

A friend of mine sent me a link to this song called 'In Mumbai Waiting for a Miracle', sung by Raghu Dixit. Its a super cool song! Check out their latest album here. You can actually listen to some of the songs online...If you like them, buy the album and don't just pirate it from a friend.

At IITK, had a nice & enlightening discussion on the wrongs of piracy, with Shreyas and other folks from IITK. It is true that we all want the music/movie we like for free. So, without any feeling of guilt we copy this stuff from a friend, buy pirated copies, etc. But we must not undermine the ordeal an artist goes through in creating a music album or a movie. As Shreyas rightly said, many small artists rely on the sales of the albums for livelihood. It costs lakhs of rupees to create a very simplistic music album...and it then hurts to find out that people are simply making umpteen number of copies of the album and rotating it around...where will the money come from?

It is true that it is quite tough to prevent piracy. But the least we can do is instill a sense of guilt among people who very actively do it. It should be looked upon as a social gaffe...only then can we expect atleast the elite and the educated to give up on it!

On this topic, if you have not checked out radioverve yet, go and do it right away !!

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Ambigrams!

Thanks to ego, a.k.a. Gautham, I got hooked onto creating ambigrams for some of my friend's name... Believe its damn addictive and a great stress buster... The beauty is the innumerable ways in which every ambigram can be created !! MARIA
This is a special one..one way it reads BHASKAR, and when read upside-down, right to left, it is BHARATI..dedicated to my friends who are now life-partners!


Yours truely, ANKITA
My DD, ie, DEEPTHI
ARAVIND
VARUN

SANKARSHAN

RUNA