Me the podcaster
This is a test podcast done in collaboration with James Hardy, Murtaza Wardak and Jessica Irani. Its about music sharing and whether or not it is ethical.
No prizes for guessing where a bunch of avid (but poor) music fans like ourselves take this debate!
Waves
“I hope you dance” by Leanne Womack has one great line – “I hope you still feel small when you stand beside the ocean” – Being all of 5′2″, I feel small most times – but having grown up in my “tiny island nation” as my Imperialist friends like to call it, I know exactly what she means. One thing about Chennai, is that its a coastal city, which means I dont suffer the withdrawal symptoms that afflict my Bangalore and other land bound friends so frequently. And somehow I never fail to appreciate the sea – never. Yesterday was no exception – ok, so Marina Beach may have much too much sand and the water too far away and the pineapple was a tad too raw (I expressed these opinions much to Karthik’s outrage – I think he owns the Marina food franchise).. but somehow just sitting near the water and watching the waves and occasionally the ships, makes everything seem worthwhile and yet so insignificant in importance. It’s a bit dangerous actually, because its this kind of mood that actually makes people ask questions like “Who am I?” and ‘Why am I here?”, which I somehow prefer to leave unanswered. But also it allows you to ignore the grumpy people who get upset about trivial things like “I cant believe you guys were eating mango while we were walking around looking for you” – pish taw I say. Get over it.
it starts…
Some are born great and some have greatness thrust upon them – or so the saying goes. Taking that one step further I guess we can assume that some people are born to write blogs while others have blogs thrust upon them – I fall into the latter category. Its not like I haven’t been MEANNG to write a blog – I’ve been meaning to start up a blog documenting my time in India ever since I got here, which was like erm.. 7 months ago? So I guess this classroom excercise is a pretty good thing, because now I can kill two birds with one stone. That is… I fulfil the requirements for this workshop and I finally get my blog off the ground.
Ofcourse there is the usual drawback. Where do I start? How do I condense seven months worth of experience into one blog post, sitting in lab 3 of the Asian College of Journalism? It’s been an intense time – friends have been made – some for life (or at least I’d love to think so), friend circles have changed with little or no regret, transitions have happened, there have been tense times bordering on the ugly, there is all that I have learned, there is all that I’m learning… there is what I will learn… both in class and out of it (such as how to eat pani poori and bargain with unscrupulous auto drivers in Tamil) and now I’m beginning to wish I had done this seven months ago.
But to use another cliche and hackneyed term – Better late than never… What we need here is a structure. So I will not attempt to recap – because that bores me and my notorious memory always lets me down. SO what i will do is blog in the present and resort to flashbacks as, when and IF they occur to me.
But I will give you an idea of who I am and what and where I am right now. (through pictures – because apparently they’re worth a 1000 words apiece)
Thats ME
And these are my FRIENDS:
