18 Till I Die

The last couple of weekends have been happening in terms of socio-cultural interactions and chores to take care of. It all started with the Shreya Ghoshal concert on Friday the 19th. It was an evening concert at 7 pm and after a first hour or so of sidey dancers and the "band" introductions, Shreya was singing some of her famous numbers alongside the SaReGaMa fame Shivprasad. The acoustics in the Dorton arena left much to desire, but once we moved down from our seats closer to the stage, it wasn't bad at all. We could see her sing and dance and hear her hit difficult notes almost at will. A few close friends and I had a good shake-a-leg to some hit numbers like Zoobi Doobi and Dola Re...After the break, she sang some regional songs on public demand including a famous Marathi lavani "Reshamaachya reghaani". All in all while Shreya continued to dazzle, IMHO the performance was strictly alright owing to the sorry acoustics and sad dancers. Not to mention the urdu-esque wannabe shayarana compere Niharika.

Following two days were spent amid loud music and repetitive dance performances at the India Fest. The only highlight for us were a bunch of close friends singing and dancing on stage. While HK sang the Jaane Kya Chahe Mann from Pyaar Ke Side Effects, HR stuck to the more safer Mitwa from Lagaan. "Useless" also was part of a dance number called India Kaleidoscope which included a montage of dances from hit movie songs like Prem Ki Nayya and Aahun Aahun. Apart from the dance and singing performances of these dear ones, the iFest was a loud melee for the most part. I was left with a big headache at the end of those two weekend days.

Sunday was spent at the R's place playing "lagori" and flying "kite" (just cheel chill just chill) amid nice evening tea and then unwinding playing Mafia and eating a pizza dinner. To top it off, we played Table Tennis at 11.00 pm at night to make it a fun-filled amazing weekend.

During the week I made a generous contribution of a grand to the Honda Motor Corp. trying to do manicure, pedicure and the likes on my sweet sexy coupe. Those guys know how to unstitch the pockets out of your jeans...sigh.

This weekend was Sifar's birthday weekend. The big 3-0. But he's managed to keep himself upbeat like they say 30s is the new 20s or something like that. The b'day started with a customary visit to the temples followed by a buffet lunch with a couple of co-workers at CoolBreeze. My head was clogged in the morning due to some seasonal cold, and I was craving for the spicy hot rassam at the desi place. After a sumptuous lunch, I managed to retire to a nice long afternoon Siesta. Although, I missed a few calls from people wishing me b'day, the afternoon nap was awesomeness throughout. The evening was spent with cake-cutting and a khichadi dinner at AG and HR's place. Thanks guys for making it special.

Thanks also to everyone of you who called remembering my big day and making it special. The social networking boom gives people easy access to each other's birthdays and makes it possible for us to post wishes on our friends'/family's online profiles. Many thanks are therefore due to those who posted on my wall and scrapped in my scrapbook as well. Needless to say you all are the reason I exist, you all are the ones who make this journey worthwhile.

Hoping to put the literal and figurative icing on the cake with a birthday dinner @ The Cheese Cake Factory....the revelry continues....the exuberance of youth (of the past?) beckons...the 30 something mind croons 18 Till I Die...

Cheers,
Sifar.

boost::bind and boost::function awesomeness throughout

On Thursday I was helped by a co-worker to look more closely into boost::bind and boost::function. Its just awesome what you can do with these two together. Say you are writing a library which intends to provide a thread-safe way of accessing a certain structure (ElementType) for the users of your library. In a typical case you would have a container that contains some n objects of ElementType and you want the user to be able to iterate over these. A cool way to do this is to let the user pass a function delegate for your API to call within the thread-safety semantics of your library code. For instance if you had a container ElementContainer every access to which was made thread-safe using an ACE_Guard with a local mutex variable, then you can provide the users of your library an element visitor something to the effect of:

typedef boost::function1 <> ElementVisitor;

and then provide a public API function:

bool VisitElements(const Key& key, const ElementVisitor& visitor);

What the above psuedo-code does is it provides the user a way to iterate thru' the ElementContainer (which contains objects of ElementType) in a thread-safe way that's transparent to the user using a key to find which elements to iterate over. All the user needs to do is instantiate an ElementVisitor delegate which takes the ElementType as a const ref argument and do his mumbo jumbo inside the delegate which would be called inside the context of the library.

But the magic only begins here. boost::bind can be used to tie any random caller function to the ElementVisitor. And club this with boost::ref and boost::cref, you can also have multiple return types in the caller functions. For instance let's say the user of the library has a function as below:

void UsersClass::ElementVisitorFunc(uint32_t arg1, uint32_t arg2, const ElementType& elem);

this can be bound to the ElementVisitor as below:

ElementVisitor del = boost::bind(&UsersClass::ElementVisitorFunc, this, arg1, arg2, _1);

Whats magical about this is although to the caller this is a function call with three arguments, to the library that provides a thread-safe API to visit and access the contained ElementType objects, its a function call with a single argument of type const ElementType&.

Just awesomeness throughout. Thanks DJ and KR for introducing me to this wonderful visitation technique.

Sifar.

The Bridge Over The Enoxa

These were two prosperous kingdoms on the either side of the mighty Enoxa. The Enoxa would freeze in the cold ghastly winter of the north and that's about the only time people from either kingdoms could visit each other. Enoxa's basin was wide and its current strong to forbid any human movement otherwise. In winter however, it would snow a lot and the entire river would freeze. Paradoxically, the dark harsh winters was a time of merriment for people of the two kingdoms who had kins on either sides. The peoples of the two kingdoms would visit each other share gifts, spend valuable time together before it was time again for the Enoxa to melt away their joys.

Both the kings summoned their generals and commanded them..."Generals, our brethren can't meet their blood relations otherwise but in winter, we need to build a bridge during this approaching winter and make it survive the strong currents of the Enoxa when it melts. Summon the best of our architects/engineers and build a plan to get it done".

And so the two fiercest of generals that the entire north knew took the task (at their respective master's orders) to a war-footing. The generals had only 5 months. The winter had already started to set. The Enoxa was slowly freezing. The black shadow of death was slowly being cast. The generals had to summon their best men, come up with a plan and build the bridge of hope across the Enoxa. So the best architects that both the kingdoms had were sought; they came up with a design and work started after a couple of months over the frozen Enoxa.

The gritty workers from both the kingdoms started to work together, the work of digging huge bores thru' the frozen waters of the Enoxa, laying a deep foundation some 50 feet beyond where the frozen waters met the ground. They toiled day and night, they moved huge stones and constructed columns from either end of the Enoxa's large basin. They built upon the foundation that they had made; created aqueducts for the water to flow thru' so it would stand the test of the Enoxa's currents in summer. Everything looked good and the bridge looked well on the way to completion.

Until one fine new moon night the two supervising generals, over some drunken revelry, had a fight. Each burning in the fury of their egos, withdrew their workers from their side of the bridge and called it quits. The bridge of hope suddenly looked dull and perishing under the moonless night sky. The stars shone brightly, but down below, the bridge was dilapidated. Weeks passed by and the unfinished bridge with its arched stone columns started sagging as the water started to melt. The kings, oblivious to the happenings of the fateful night, were eager to see how their famed generals had done on the so called bridge of hope. The generals hurriedly re-visited the site and were saddened by what they saw. They soon realized that in their brief moment of stupidity they had blew the bridge and it would never get done now. It was too late then...atleast for that winter.

The Enoxa is a symbol of time and bridges are the relationships that we build during our life over time...don't burn them before they are even made.


--Sifar.

रंज कि जब गुफ्तगू होने लगी...

The revelry continues. Daag continues to arrest me with his captivating words. The matla of today's ghazal also has been a FB status in the recent past. This ghazal is special because unlike the normal subject of the ghazal which centers around describing the beauty or pain of love, it talks about these sweet-sour moments of enmity between two people (in love). The couplets below caught my attention because of some quibble I recently had with a friend of mine. It goes unsaid that the lyrics are more appealing if you just have had a fight with someone or you hold animosity in your heart for someone. I sincerely hope that you don't find them as appealing as I did back then;). We will talk about a few shers from this ghazal today. The matla is as follows:

रंज कि जब गुफ्तगू होने लगी,
अाप से तुम, तुम से तू होने लगी।

I find worth mentioning two more shers...

चाहिए पैगामबर दोनो तरफ,
लुत्फ क्या जब दुबदु होने लगी।

Verbatim:

पैगामबर - messenger(s)
दुबदु - face to face.

The above couplet talks about how when you need to communicate with someone whom you have fought with, you involve others to exchange messages without directly speaking with each other face-to-face. It talks about how two people who are mad @ each other send messages to one another via some intermediary. It insists that one-on-ones are no fun.

मेरी रुस्वाई की नौबत आ गई,
उनकी शोहरत कुबकु होने लगी।

Verbatim:

रुस्वाई - bad mouthing/notoriety.
कुबकु - every place in the neighborhood/town.

The entire ghazal talks about this duel between two people. The expression of hostility is evident in all the couplets. Although, I have gotten past my temporary emotion of antipathy, its only human if some people tick you off the wrong way, you get mad at them. The ghazal beautifully captures this very human emotion and although it pertains to bickering between two people who like each other, it can be generalized to people who have just had a fight.

As for the musical framing of this ghazal, I have heard it sung by Ghulam Ali - the undisputed Badshah of Ghazal singing. The ghazal's set to an evening Raga Bhoopali. Although the normal mood of this raga is meditative, the lyrics of the ghazal, and the tuning of the instruments on this recording sets the tone for bitter emotions. Ghulam Ali is always a master-act and is particularly adept at singing specific words from the Ghazal so as to bring out the emotions adherent to the meaning. If you hear him carefully, you would notice that with his singing he adds such nuances (to the words) that one can literally feel the emotion behind the couplet. He has done that beautifully here as well. Worth mentioning is the various ways in which he sings Ranj, to indicate aversion. Do take a listen to this one; I am sure you would find other versions online, if not, buzz me up and I will share with you the version I have.

--Sifar.

p.s. Please listen to this without having a need to fight with someone ;).

Confessions of a mochaholic

I am a self-confessed mochaholic. Every weekend that I am in town, I visit the local mocha-bar and revel in the ecstasy of the drinks served at the local brewery. Sifar starts off this post confessing to his Starbucks addiction, but won't dwell on it for long. He wants to take his readers from the wasted monotonicity of travelogues (the last three posts) to the aroma of a freshly pressed Sher-a-latte. As I write in third-person I must mention I do owe this style to a lot of characters from Scrubs...remember the TOD and Cole from the new episodes?

Btw IMHO the new Scrubs is quite a cheap let down compared to the classic and although Bill Lawrence clearly states that the ninth season should be considered a totally new series (Scrubs Med. School), the producers ABC is having a hard time to let go off the original series title amid the omens of losing viewership (owing to the exodus of Zach Braff and Judy Reyes, two of shows main casts).

Today's Sher-a-latte is centered around a long due critique of Daag. I have been suffering from Daagmania over the past few weeks and unlike the vanilla suffering, this has been a blessing. I was blessed with an opportunity to listen some very good couplets, revisit some which I didn't know were Daag's. Daag Dehlvi was an Urdu poet who lived in the 19th Century. Urdu poets usually have a nom de plume (takhallus in Urdu) and Daag had his. Nawab Mirza Khan hailed from Delhi and was probably referring to the pain, the strife, the taint, the grief he had in his life and thus wrote under the pseudonym Daag Dehlvi. A lot of his ghazals have been sung by notable singers like Mehdi Hassan, Ghulam Ali.

Today, we will talk about two of his couplets. I have no idea which parent ghazals these shers belong to. The first one I want to tie back to the title of the post and we"ll analyze in the Sher-A-Day form. I first heard it in a rare audio recording of Dr. Vasantrao Deshpande expressing his views on Urdu Poetry:

ज़ािहद शराब िपने दे मसज़िद में बैठ कर
या फ़िर वो जगह बता दे जहाँ पर खुदा नही ।

Verbatim:

ज़ािहद - follower, priest.

Literatim:

O' priest, let me drink in the mosque,
or else tell me a place where there is no god.

Discussion:

Clearly this sher is centered around the omni-presence of God. It challenges the very institution of a "temple". It asks questions of these ardent followers of god, who go to the temple and pray thinking that God would forgive them of all their worldly sins and help them overcome the hurdles in life. The very fact that god is ubiquitous, begs the question, how can a pious person commit all these sins during his day-to-day life and yet when within the confines of these so called temple-places, pretend to be all devout and ethical and can get away with asking for forgiveness. He cannot. The sher while making a mockery of the classical idea of worship asks of individuals to stay pious, committed on taking the high road, and hold themselves to higher moral standards in all walks of their lives. A gem of a couplet; I wonder if my interpretative liberties do any real justice to it; but then so is true with any poem. The "artha" of the poem is totally up to the reader's discernment. While the verbatim meaning is straightforward and poses an impasse for the priestly clan, in my opinion this sher has sarcasm written all over it.

The second sher, I am sure has been heard by everyone in one form or the other. I heard it for the first time in my 10th grade Hindi class during Summer vacations. Our tutor, Mr. Dubey was an un-assuming character who wore Premchand, Harivanshrai Bacchan and the likes on his sleeves. For the teenagers within us, his couplets and knowledge of literature were awesome things to hang on to, so we could listen to them and show-off using them on the first chance we got to. One fine summer afternoon, while teaching Godaan or something similar from our Hindi text books, he blurted it out of nowhere. It had a tremendous impact on my then teenaged mind and taught me how easy/difficult it is to overcome a tragedy that is love. I am pretty sure I didn't understand what love was back then, but the notion did seem appealing. So here is the couplet:

तू है हरजाई तो अपना भी ये तेॊर सही,
तुम नही अेॊर सही, अेॊर नही, अेॊर सही।

This one is a classical break-up couplet. It talks about the lover who is shattered by his paramour leaving him(her). The harsh reality of a relationship failure strikes hard, but is soon transformed into care-free thoughts. The heart-broken dude or dame (well it hardly happens with girls; their gestation period of moving on is typically a little longer than guys) is ready to move on and knows for sure that there will be others who would come along the way. The lover convinces himself that there are others out there and his love isn't worthy of being trampled over by the unfaithful and rash acts of his "ex". I am sure a whole chunk of us can relate to these lines and have heard them or used them at sometime or the other.

So here goes to all the people in love out there on v-day..hang on to what you got, and treat them with utmost TLC and make them feel special, else rest assured that sooner or later they will move on.

--Sifar.