No words to explain !

I happened to meet one of my friend at Microsoft and thus his friends and friend's friends and so on, simply, buch of like aged folks. Pretty interesting crowd comprising of people with varied interests ranging from western classical music to some thing as crazy as piercing. Somehow we got into this discussion about music particularly how western music has evolved over the past few decades. I was suggesting that western classical has remained pretty much the same for a long time. It's only the rock,pop,jazz and other alternative music that has been changing. In fact people now cannot distinguish between rock/pop any more. All this have created way for alternative-rock, alternative-pop which are even more confusing in terms of style. And of course nothing can be called contemporary/mainstream pop/rock these days. It is quite understandable that like anything else in this world, music too evolves over a period of time. This was where I made a point about Carnatic music.

I was suggesting that western music in the form of rock/pop etc. didn't follow any rules and most cases were based on the difference in the use of percussion and the style of compositions. While, Carnatic music has a set of rules; these rules form the foundation of the system. I was trying to explain to them that Carnatic music was a perfect combination of art and science. With the science part covering the necessary conditions and the art part of it covering the sufficient conditions. I actually could not articulate what ever I was thinking and was trying to convey at that time. I was tad surprised that nobody could understand/appreciate this beautiful aspect of Carnatic music.

That reminded me of a Tamil kezhamozi(proverb) "Kazhudai'kku theriyuma karpoora vaasanai" i.e. how can a donkey appreciate the smell of camphor ? anyways, I just thought that to myself, the intention was to be metaphorical and not literal,though. Partly it's my spoken-english skills that failed me, also, put me in an awkward situation where I had an answer but could not communicate it properly. Anyways, I got back home, browsed the internet to see if someone had tried to do this before. Found something interesting on the same lines here an article by "Shri Mudicondan Venkatarama Iyer" presumably written few decades ago.

Long Weekends ?

Yet another long weekend went past in a jiffy. Once again couple of my friends and me went on a long road trip. For some reasons I don't get tired of these road-trips. The part that I love the most about these road-trips is that there is very little or no planning that goes into it. Wake up one morning rent a car and start driving, go places, meet different people, try different food, its out right fun, trust me.

Added to all these; songs from my prodigious music collection packed into my iRiver mp3 player is a treat to the ears on such long trips. We get to re-live our nostagia through these songs. Particularly, I have literally grown listening to Illayaraja's sensational numbers and pretty much every song takes me to those periods of my life.

That reminds me, for the first time I got hold of some FLAC encoded IR songs. They sound much better than the regular 128kbps mp3 but, file size is a little high at ~25MB for a 4 minute song. I still wonder why music is not recorded on surround/dolby, music should let go the stereotyped stereo(pun blatantly intended) and incorporate surround/dolby, that way we can give much more definition to music and also use our expensive home theater systems effectively to listen to music.

One interesting/little scary thing happened on our road-trip this time. One of my friend in his attempt to park the car at the hotel parking lot where we stayed hit the gas pedal instead of the brakes and ran into the building. I was sitting in the passenger seat and was horrified for a moment. We were driving a Nissan Murano which is a pretty rugged SUV. It a powerful SUV with a sensitive gas pedal, the slight gas that he gave was enough for it to uproot couple of supporting pillars and punch a hole on the side wall :-)

Nobody was hurt including the car, the hotel manager was pretty cool as if such incidents were very common. Anyways our asses were completely covered by the insurance otherwise we would have had to spend a fortune to fix the property damage.