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