Washington Social Club

They are an Indie rock band, you guessed it right , based out of Washington DC. I saw them play at the Kennedy Center as part of the Prelude festival. They sounded great. It was a short 40 minute performance. They have released an album and are currently working on the second one. They played some songs from their first album "Catching looks". Notable among them is "Backed to the future".

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Official website
"Backed to the future" on youtube.com
Prelude festival webpage

Wikipedia - Learn here

On the web besides google, I use wikipedia the most. I have never been a fan of encyclopedias (in book form). I have always thought of them as cumbersome. I like the search and link features of wikipedia (in general any website). This way I can get the information I want quickly and also jump to topics in the presented information immediately.

Today I was looking up on the novel Hyperion by Dan Simmons and ended up on a wild chase on quite a few topics. Here are a few of the topics I checked.

Hyperion the novel
Titan
Parthenogenesis
Mediocrity Principle
Giant impact hypothesis

Raincoat, a rainy afternoon in search of love

Raincoat is a movie for a lazy afternoon when you have nothing else to do. It is a unhurried movie with a simple plot. If you are a fan of Aishwarya Rai and would like to see her in domestic plainness this is the movie. It has a beautiful soundtrack, many of them by Shubha Mudgal. The story is a reworking of O Henry's short story "The Gift of Magi".

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Listen to the soundtrack at musicindiaonline.com
Raincoat at imdb.com
Raincoat at rediff.com
Another review

Water, water everywhere

I went to see Water amid forecasts of rain and walked in to the theater slightly wet from the drizzle and walked back home fully drenched. I for one, never felt that the movie was happening in Benares (true because it was filmed in far away Sri Lanka). But some of my other American friends seem to have had no problems in believing it was Benares from what they have heard and known about Benares. For me the ghats were the ones that gave away. Apart from the art direction, there were some good performances from Seema Biswas (Shakuntala), Sarala (Chuiya) and Manorama (Madhumathi). Especially Sarla who plays an exuberant child widow, who does not comprehend her widowhood and is waiting to be sent home. Surprisingly Lisa Ray played the doe-eyed Kalyani pretty well.

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Wikipedia on Water
Water at imdb.com

Kandisa

A decade ago, the only instrumental music I liked was the Soundscapes series released by Music Today. Then came enigma in college and later on at work, Indian Ocean. Today I went to their concert in DC. It was splendid. They are a lively group with effervescent Rahul Ram with his funny anecdotes.

The first album I heard of them was Kandisa and I was hooked, especially the song Kandisa. It has vocals in Armaic, the old language of Jesus's time. Its a beautiful soothing song and the words, though I could not understand, I could sense peace and tranquility in them. There are other songs that are qually good like "Ma Rewa", "Hillele le" etc. Their latest song "Banden" for the movie "Black Friday" is also brilliant.

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Wikipedia on Indian Ocean
Indian Ocean Website
Listen to Kandisa on musicindaionline.com
Listen to some of their other songs

Khoon chala

Silkroute stormed the Indian music scene in late 90's with their amazing video Dooba Dooba. Once you got past the video you realise that the lead vocals are heavenly, which belong to Mohit Chauhan. Their music reminds you of the hills. Their songs are simple with beautiful lyrics and haunting melodies. Just listen to Boondein or Humsafar or Sapnay, you will know what I mean.

Its been 4 or more years since they released Pehchaan. I was googling on them to know latest news about them and came up on this song Khoon chala from Rang De Basanti sung by Mohit Chauhan. It is a beautiful song with nuances that evoke courage, hope and pain sung majestically in a silken voice. I can't see anyone else be able to sing this song and evoke similar emotions.

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On Silkroute
Listen to Khoon chala
Listen to Boondein, Pehchaan

World of Warcraft

As a month of my WOW (World of Warcraft) subscription comes to an end , I hate to say that I am hooked. For the longest time I resisted the urge to try out this MMORPG, mostly because I did not want to outgrow the World of Warcraft as I have seen in the Warcraft game series. WOW, the game asked for a switch to RPG from pure strategy genre. I play RPG games, actually I play them more than strategy games these days, but this was a switch I did not want to do. In reality it is not so much of an RPG, that is my opinion though. Neverthless it is a good game.

It gives you opportunities to plays with the other online gamers, which in my experience adds a different dimension to the whole gaming experience altogether. It is hard to get a good group of strangers to play with, but when that happens it is magical. This one time I ended up with a group of 3 people in an in-game instance (instance is an area in the game created fresh for a group and only that group gets to control what happens in the instance ). It was a balanced group (Warrior, Hunter, Druid and Mage) and we were killing bad guys and so on. Soon the mage had to leave and then we were forced to ask ourselves whether we could continue the instance as you needed a pool of abilities to fight the evil guys in any instance and we thought we were woefully short after the fourth member left. Neverthless we decided to carry on and what followed was surreal . Three of us almost acted together like a complete being, one co ordinating with the other with out any communication. In the end what we thought was impossible seemed pretty straight forward. As we came to the end of the instance we were left wondering how we managed to complete it.

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World of Warcraft
Wikipedia on MMORPG

Kajra re

First time I heard this song from Bunty and Babli, I got up and danced. Thats what this song does to you. I checked out this song after hearing about Shankar Mahadevan being nominated for an award for this song. I keep listening to it time and again and end up dancing to it most of the times. I like it for its Indianness, the quawalli and the seetis. It is refershing to know this earthy track ruled the charts for a long time and went on to get awards. Alisha has got a beautiful voice and she knows how to mould it as the song requires. Sometimes I wonder why she does not sing often for films. It has been remixed by many to create different twists to the original score.

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Music review of Bunty and Babli
Listen to Kajra re
Listen to Jumbalika

Aye aye sir

Those words brought warm smiles once upon a time. They meant that I now could create elven destroyers and that was good. I am talking here about a game called Warcraft 2 , the tide of darkness, one of the best strategy games for a long time. This was the first computer game that captured my interest and I have spent many a weekend repulsing orcish raids and devising new ways to use death knights back in my school days. I still remember copying the game in to 20 floppy disks after zipping it and splitting it and praying all the floppies survive the 200 kilometer trip home on bumpy roads with out getting bad sectors.

I recently bought Warcraft 3 and got this as a freebie and was thrilled. For some reason the game was not as tough as I remembered it to be. I remember spending many many hours trying to get past the first level in the expansion pack. This time around I finished it in one sitting. Did I get better at playing computer games? Whatever the case be I did not feel the same charm anymore, I had seen a whole slew of games over the years. But I spent couple of days playing it and reliving some good old memories.

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Warcraft at gamespot.com
Warcraft 2 sounds
Warcraft lore

Satya

As I casually browsed my music collection to listen to something as I went through the mundane stuff that needs to get done, on a Sunday before the week starts after the whole of Saturday was wasted, I chanced upon Satya. I listen to music in different languages and being South Indian that means I might be listening to the soundtrack of the same movie in three different languages, usually Tamil, Telugu and Hindi as many popular movies in these languages get dubbed into the other two. I had downloaded the some of the songs from Satya's Telugu version recently and I started to listen to that and then moved on to the Hindi soundtrack. I have always liked Satya's Hindi soundtrack, even though the tunes are the same. It has a great soundtrack from the moody "badalon se" to the peppy "sapno mein", from the slow "geela geela pani" to the ultimate gangster song "goli maro". The soundtrack perfectly gels with the movie and songs never stand out of the narrative like usual bollywood movie songs.

Last but not least, who can forget the movie. It is one of the best movies made on Mumbai underworld. The thing that I remember most about the movie is the shocking scene where Bhiku Matre gets killed. Manoj Bajpai went places in Bollywood after his superb performance in Satya as Bhiku Matre. I had watched him before in the Doordarshan soap "Swabhimaan" and was pretty sure he was destined for better things. This film revealed another side of Urmila, at least to me. She plays a simple middle class girl aspiring for a better life. Then there is JD (Satya), who pulls of an amazing performance as an intelligent, fearless strategist. The movie has a host of other actors who played their parts to perfection. It is an intelligent movie and does not take sides. It reveals the other side of gangsters, Bhiku Matre's scenes with his family are a perfrect example.

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Listen to the Hindi soundtrack of Satya
An exhaustive review of Satya

Luka chuppi

My wanderings on the internet lead me to some news on Rang de Basanti. After reading some reviews, I became curious about the soundtrack as I had heard the sound track sometime back ater knowing that it had music by AR Rehman and don't remember being interested in it. Just for kicks I listened again this Sunday and I ended up downloading and listening to "Luka chuppi" , actually many times over. The guitar piece in the beginning sounded very familiar, I could not recollect where I heard it before. It is a beautiful song. Towards the end tabla joins in with other instruments and it takes the song to another level. ARR sounds magnificient in the song.

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Listen to songs from Rang de Basanti here
Download Luka Chuppi from here
A technical review of the soundtrack

Two great movies - Munich & Alfie

I had a good time this weekend watching two great movies - Munich and Alfie. Both of them were moving in different ways. I do not remember seeing murders on film that are as gruesome as shown in Munich. It is bit lengthy by hollywood standards but I never realised the passage of time as it kept me engrossed. I have not seen anyone play a hurt human as Eric Bana in Munich. The way his face changes through the movie is an interesting study in emotions. Critics seem to have a mixed opinion on Munich unlike Alfie where the opinion seems to be of disappointment. I have not seen the one with Michael Caine, so in a way I had no prejudice. I think that this is the best movie Jude Law has done. He seems to come push it up a notch with each new role he gets. Jude Law just oozes charm in this one.

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Alfie on rottentomatoes.com
Munich on Yahoo Movies