A Secondary Blog, and a little tweeting

Growing up as a Mallu kid outside of Kerala, part of my affinity to my home state is built on the fact that I watched a lot of Malayalam movies as a kid. While in Delhi we used to rent video-tapes from a guy who would come around every weekend on a scooter, and every time we went to Kerala in the summer, we would go watch at least a couple of movies in the theatre (usually the Pattom Kalpana theatre in Trivandrum). While most movies were fun to watch, Mohanlal’s movies were a special treat. He’d end up playing these fallible, slightly-flawed, very human (as opposed to superhuman) characters stuck in difficult situations where their innate goodness/impish charm/comic timing would (mostly) win through, allowing them to get the girl, sing a couple of songs, cultivate a comic sidekick and, quite often, strike a blow for the proletariat.

A few days ago I found a whole host of clips from Mallu movies on YouTube, which brought back memories. I first thought of doing just one or two posts right here on this blog, but then I figured it could be a whole side project, at least for a while. Hence an all-new tumblelog (a nod to Han for restarting my interest in Tumblr - I'd created an id but ran out of ideas on what to do on it). 

I plan to link to a fun scene in the movies I’ve seen and provide a plot outline for them. This isn’t a work of scholarly research, just me posting about movies I enjoyed growing up. So do drop by and leave a comment. Incidentally, if you’re wondering about the URL, that’s the name of one of my favourite Mohanlal movies. 

Also, I think I'm going to get active on Twitter again. I'm a little too low on motivation and inspiration to type out longer posts. The little box on the top right on this page has my Twitter stream. 

Apropos Nothing

Trying to teach myself to play the guitar is working out pretty
decently. At some point I might even get around to playing something
tuneful. In the meantime I quite like the focus and discipline
involved in practising. My attention span is usually pretty short, so
it's an interesting challenge to get myself to concentrate fully on
one activity for an hour, undisturbed, especially when it's not
something I have to do, just something I want to do. It's a good
exercise in getting over the usual inertia of daily life which has
been quite overpowering of late. I do have a couple of text documents
floating around my comp with incomplete blog posts typed up in them,
so maybe I'll get around to finishing them and putting them up here
sometime. In the meantime this is just to inform you that this blog
has not been abandoned.

Starting the New Year Right

Starting today, I'm going to try and teach myself the basics of playing the guitar by the end of March. Nothing fancy, just get to learn a few chords, be able to transition between them on simple songs without getting all my fingers tangled up, and generally not look like too much of a dork while playing*. This is only partly due to the fact that the New Year has begun - it's also because I got my bonus (yes, even in times such as these!) last month and I had a little disposable income to, well, dispose of. Besides, I figured I could do with a new challenge to liven things up at home.

This isn't the first time I'm trying to learn, though. I tried it when I was about 12, but unfortunately my guitar classes were at the same time that all my friends would start playing cricket in the park just outside my house. That always sounded a lot more fun than trying to hold a guitar about the same size as me and trying to read music. I think I quit in about 3 months, then.

I'm hoping that by putting this up on my blog, I'll now have an added incentive to make sure I practise, sort of like a Commitment Contract. The only thing I'm apprehensive about is that I'm going to end up bugging my neighbours, at least until my strumming starts sounding a little more tuneful.

  

Anybody else out there got any interesting resolutions?

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*How you look is very important in matters such as these. I gave up on smoking within a month of trying it because I realized I didn't look anywhere as cool as Bogart.