Getti Melam.. A fun-filled wedding celebration...

A very talented bunch of people from a bay area based Sanhiti group came up with this exhilarating program called "Getti Melam" during the weekend of Sep 23 and 24 of 2006. It comprised of a fun-filled skit interleaved with beautifully choreographed songs from Tamil films. The foot taping dance numbers was a combination of traditional Tamil folk, contemporary jazz,hip-hop and salsa. This 2.5 hours of non-stop excitement was well received by the audience with ear shattering applause and "once more" requests for some popular numbers. In order to cater to the bay area crowd, this show had a repeat performance on Sunday with house full audience.
The skit, entirely in Tamil, was scripted extremely well without loosing pace with the flow of the show. Every dialogue made the audience roar with laughter and was delivered with exactly the right modulation so as to bring out the humor in it. The artists were real professionals when it came to presentation and timing. The countless hours put into scripting this and practicing it really paid off at the end. Hats off to the entire crew of the skit for coming out with such a thoroughly enjoyable skit.
The dance numbers, entirely from Tamil films, was aptly chosen to go along with the script and creatively choreographed. Again, another hats off to the choreo team. Given the choice of songs, the dance artists came up with such a performance that words did not matter in those numbers. Every song was choreographed with a specific style of dance and the artists did complete justice in delivering those styles even though many of them were newcomers and are just learning those style of dances. Hours and hours of practicing made this all possible. The dedication of the entire team was just amazing and it showed well from their performance.
The skit and dances would not have come out this well if not for the very creative production team which worked behind the scenes to come up with magnificent backdrops and sets to bring a real wedding theme on the stage. The swing set, also known as Oonjal in Tamil, was the icing on the already delicious cake. The coordination of lights and sound was just perfect which took this show to a new level of creativity. My, third, hats off to the Production team.
It has to be mentioned that this entire show was done as a fund raiser for a non-profit organization called Asha which supports education for under privileged kids in India among many other things. The entire Sanhiti team had contributed their "hard to find" time for this noble cause and made it a grand success. I am eagerly looking forward for their next production. Great job Sanhitians...

Photo through Sanhiti

CBS Innertube...

I came across this cool feature called CBS Innertube on the CBS website. It features complete episodes of all the hit CBS primetime shows online starting this season. I watched a couple of them online today and the quality is impeccable on full screen. I think this is a great step towards promoting these primetime shows to those audiences who prefer to get their kick out of watching these shows on their laptops and desktops and not have to be glued to the TV during primetime when they can spend quality time at the dinner table with their families. To top that, they can get away with just one ad per segment while watching the show online.
I wish other networks would take a clue and follow suit. This is beginning to be the foundation for IP TV and I am glad that networks like CBS are preparing people to expect such changes in common man's TV viewing habits. I remember google videos selling these primetime shows for couple of bucks a few months back. I knew at that time that it was not far off when these shows would be available for free. Now the time has come..

Spinach and E.Coli...

Being a vegetarian, I never imagined that I would see this day where I had to throw out my triple washed, bagged and sealed spinach. I always thought it was very safe to consume bagged spinach. Never did I realize that E.coli could find its way into this too. So far only meat products were susceptible to such attacks and now it has spread to vegetables too. Having been in India for over 20 years, I had never come across a single incident of vegetables being infected with such a dangerous bacterium. In fact the vegetables are neither bagged nor washed even once and are sold on the roadside back in India. I am surprised that with all the FDA regulations and stringent policies E.Coli was still able to find its way into vegetables here in California.
Even more interesting is that the contamination has occured in a packaging plant at Salinas valley which is about 50 miles from where I live. Its scary to hear such incidents so close to home. I am now waiting for the FDA and CDC to confirm that the contamination source has been identified and we can start consuming the triple washed, bagged and sealed spinach.

Potholes...

I came across an interesting website featuring potholes in Bangalore. I wish there was one such website dedicated to Chennai as well. I am not sure about the other metro cities in India, but my recent visit to Chennai made me realize how bad the roads are once you get off the main roads.
These kind of initiatives can probably become part of the metro-blogs where each metro tracks its potholes maybe get some government attention. I am not sure how successful Bangalore has been in eliminating potholes after this initiative.

GM and gas credit...

I hate gas guzzlers and I love hybrids. Tom Friedman takes a punch at GM for subsidizing their monster SUVs with gas credits and I love it when he explains this with a common man's understanding. Listen to the following podcasts, in that order,(around 5 mins each) where he first attacks GM and then defends his attacks...


powered by ODEO


powered by ODEO

Cats in the cradle...

I was searching for this song of Harry Chapin for quite a while and finally found it today. One of my all time favourites. Listen closely to the lines and there is a whole life story of a busy dad in it. A masterpiece if you ask me. Below is the video of a live performance of this song from Harry Chapin.

Surfing from Hotspots...

I found this link very informative regarding surfing the Internet from hotspots like Airports, Starbucks, Barnes & Nobles etc. Its scary to think that your information is flying around in cleartext especially when you use popular Instant Messaging tools at these hotspots. The first thing I did today morning was to secure my home WiFi network with a 128 bit encryption key, removed the SSID broadcasting and removed connecting from "Any" SSID. I already had a client access list setup for a long time hoping that this would keep the sniffers out. I had been wanting to lock down my WiFi network for a long time but putting it off thinking who in my neighborhood would be that smart enough to sniff my WiFi traffic. Well.. now I can never be sure.