The past few days have been quite good.
On Sunday morning , i took my first SimCAT at IMS. I realised that I totally suck at DI. Maths and English are okay.
Then went for the BCQC open quiz conducted by Sumant from The Bombay Quiz Club. Teamed up with Kunal after a really long time. Actually , it was just the second time we teamed up (the first time being in the VIT music quiz where we came second). This time we put in quite a good overall performance. We topped the elims . Incidentally , the elims also saw our greatest moment in quizzing : we (widely considered to be hindi film illiterate) correctly answered a question on hindi films which Ramanand and dada got wrong. How amazing is that!! We probably should have got a few questions in the finals. Definitely should have cracked the theme earlier. If it hadn’t been for a disputed answer (the definitely-not-the-same-thing-ness of ‘Death’ and ‘Grim Reaper’ in the Sandman series) we would have come in second. Ahh well , these things happen. Anyways the quiz was amazing. All the questions were great. It was all out hard-core, totally workable , ‘intellectual’ quizzing for a Shammanthesque 5 hours. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a quiz that started at 3pm and ended at 8pm . It was a great way to spend my Sunday.
Went to college today. It was pretty uneventful until I saw the certificate ‘in appreciation of endless efforts’ for the Basketball team that Megs was proudly showing me. Now Megs’s actual name is Maeghun Vadgaama. Not the most normal name , you would say . If the double ‘a’ in the surname doesn’t stump you , the sliding vowel coupled with the ‘u’ (where an ‘a’ is customary) in ‘Maeghun’ is sure to. So it’s pretty amusing when one comes across an official document in which both name and surname have successfully taken off the bails and left the writer looking like a complete idiot. The certificate for participating in the , AHEM, extremely successful franchise that is the girls basketball team had in fact misspelled both name and surname. And it wasn’t the kind of normal mistake one would expect with such a difficult name. Normally ‘Maeghun’ would be misspelled as ‘Meghan’ but ‘Vadgaama’ would be spelt quite correctly. On this certificate however in addition to the expected ‘Meghan’ , Vadgaama was spelt as ‘Vadaghum’ ! The bugger hadn’t even bothered to write Ms. before the name and left it as Mr./Ms ! . We had quite a great laugh about it. Mr/Ms Meghan Vadaghum has also blogged about it.
The BCQC will be organising two quizzes this sunday ie the 27th of July. Entry is free for both quizzes.
The first quiz ,’The Interrogative’ , is a school quiz and will be set and conducted by Maitreyi , Yash and Rohit .
The second quiz will be an open quiz set by members of the Bombay Quiz Club and conducted by Sumant .
Further details are available on the BCQC blog.
I don’t really follow the proceedings in the Lok Sabha , but I do follow most of the big stuff like trust votes. Today’s session was really entertaining and very interesting.
Rahul Gandhi’s ‘Kalawati’ speech was fun , Lalu was hilarious , Omar Abdullah’s speech was brilliant. Then the whole bribing allegations added a lot more drama to the situation. It was quite sad that the Prime Minister , Dr. Manmohan Singh , could not deliver his speech and had to just publish it on his website. The speech was really good [read it here] and it would have been interesting to see the reactions of LK Advani and Prakash Karat , but unfortunately the BJP could not extend the basic courtesy of not disrupting the Prime Minister’s speech.
Now that the UPA has won , the only thing left to do is predict tomorrow’s headlines. My money is on a derivative of / lame reference to “Singh is Kinng“
Btw , check out this great article. Trust Vote : Bollywood Ishtyle.
I had my first experience of Pub Quizzing yesterday. About eight of us went to Post 91 in Koregaon Park to get an experience of what this pub quizzing thing is all about.
We started pretty well by getting both the opening questions right and then screwed up by making three mistakes in the next round . Some of the questions were quite good but most of them were arbit trivia , the kind that would get you buried under a pile of stones at BC. There were a few disputable questions. Like one where we were asked , “what is India’s ballistic missile called?” Now India has quite a few ballistic missiles. So we wrote Prithvi . The QM said that Prithvi was a surface to surface missile and the correct answer was Agni . This is entirely wrong since Prithvi is a Ballistic missile. Being a surface to surface missile doesn’t make it a non-ballistic missile. We didn’t really get into any arguments at this stage and had to just let it go since Yasho , who would have normally been the person to tackle the quizmaster at this point , was too drunk to move and kept shouting “Screw You!” at everything that moved in the room .
Some of the questions that followed were decent while some were bad like colloquial names of everyday objects. In the end we lost because we didn’t know what a double handed cork screw is called by Bartenders. (It’s apparently called ‘Angel’s Wings’)
From the quizzing point of view , it wasn’t very good. Overall hanging out was lot of fun for me since everyone was getting drunk around me .Expect some interesting videos to be out on You Tube soon.
Pandit Suresh Talwalkar celebrated his 61st birthday last Saturday. As a celebration , Taalchakra had organised quite an awesome show.
It started with a huge ensemble of extremely talented musicians showing what they were made of. Primarily Vijay Ghate on tabla , Taufiq Qureshi on percussion , Rakesh Chaurasia on flute and George Brooks on saxophone put on an amazing show. I was a little skeptical about the kathak dancers since dance invariably means a huge reduction in improvisation, but they were used very well and didn’t interfere with the improvisation at all. I quite liked the use of dancers to add to the percussion . George Brooks played his original compositions with Vijay Ghate and they were brilliant. I was glad that the crowd didn’t seem to get bored with the distinctly western touch added .
Then came the boring part . The countless speeches and felicitations . The only respite was the brilliant Hariprasad Chaurasia who was very entertaining with his behavior and speech. The fact that he was flirting with Durga Jasraj (who incidentally was struggling to speak coherently and kept ranting on and on about nothing in particular ) really added a lot of entertainment value to the ceremony.
Then came the moment we were all waiting for : Ustad Zakir Hussain enthralled us with a typically brilliant display of skill and talent. He played with just one Harmonium player as accompaniment . He was totally chilled out. Talking to the audience and cracking jokes while playing crazy solos . The cameraman also captured a great scene of Pandit Vijay Ghate sitting on the floor and looking at Zakir play like a very devout chap whose God just materialised in front of him.
A highlight for me was a chance to meet Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia and Taufiq Qureshi after the concert. Hope to catch more great music this year. Some Derek and Roger hopefully .
The Pune Mirror (who else?) reports:
“Gisele Bundchen has posed topless for a fashion magazine , giving her male fans a treat by showing off her perfect bum.”
Hold on , hold on there. Let me get this straight. She took off her top and showed her bottom? Wait , that doesn’t make sense. Someone want to help me out here?
I’ve seen quite a few movies over the last fortnight or so. Here are some thoughts on some of them.
Sarkar Raj: I quite liked it. It wasn’t nearly as good as the earlier one , but good nonetheless. The acting performances were brilliant. Amitabh especially was amazing. My only complaint would be that RGV has neglected the story a bit and given way too much attention to the camera work and technical stuff. The odd angles do get a little overbearing after a while.
Hancock: The movie’s tagline says “thers su[perheroes and then there’s Hancock” Quite a few people have not liked Hancock . It is quite a different movie. For one , it’s realistic and does not have outlandish villians show up from nowhere. Also the fact that Hancock’s character is so flawed gives the movie a very unique touch. I really liked the movie. Will smith and Charlize Theron have put in really good performances. The comic elements in the movie are memorable and the action is about as expected. The explanation given for the power they have is also reasonably good.
Kung Fu Panda : When a movie has Jack Black , Jackie Chan and Dustin Hoffman in it , its gotta be good. Make that movie animated and it becomes awesome. I loved it. I’d rather not give away the jokes and stuff. The movie is great. Watch it.
And now eagerly awaiting The Dark Knight
Uzbekistan league side Kuruvchi have supposedly signed Samuel Eto’o on a six month deal. They say it wasn’t the money , but the awesome relations between Bahtier Babayev and Joan Laporta. Barca have denied al knowledge of this . I doubt if they even know that Uzbekistan has a football league. Easily the best football story I’ve heard this summer.
No, I’m not talking about the Jack Lemmon starrer . I’m referring to these two idiots who really seem to have nothing better to do.
UEFA boss Platini talks of banning clubs with debts , like Man United and Chelsea , from the Champions league next year. Why? He says these teams are cheaters. Now i fail to understand the relation between being in debt and cheating. In fact being in debt puts us at a disadvantage and doesn’t allow us to compete with other teams with no such problems. He says Madrid are a bigger club than both United and Chelsea and are not cheaters , thus Ronaldo should go there. While acknowledging the fact that Madrid has won a lot of stuff in the past , I would like to point out that they lost in the pre-quarters of the champions league this year. Also they are hardly what one might call a ‘great club’ outside the pitch. They don’t have a youth program . They steal players from Athletico (prime example :Raul). They gave their training facilities on rent to finance the purchase of Luis Figo. The sold 15 players to finance the purchase of Beckham. On the other hand , Man Utd have a thriving youth program , Sir Alex is arguably the best manager in the world when it comes to taking care of and nurturing youth and we never go to ridiculous lengths and screw with the whole club for one player. Most importantly , we win after all that.
And Mr Blatter has the nerve to compare Man United’s refusal to sell Ronaldo to ‘modern day slavery’ . Now we never forced Ronaldo to do anything. He read the contract and he signed of his own accord. It is his duty to honour the contract and Man United are doing absolutely nothing wrong by asking him to stay.
Come to think of it , even Ronaldo has agreed with Blatter’s comments about him being a slave. I wonder what his arguments is : Oh , Look at how badly they treat me. I get just a measly 6 million pounds a year. How am I supposed to survive on that?
Pah! As George Thomas would say ‘ Slavery my fundament!’
So my GRE didn’t go as badly as I thought it would and I ended up getting a respectable score . I’m quite proud of myself actually that i got past my aim of quadruple digits quite comfortably. More than anything I’m ecstatic that I got my score by studying for just five days. I had had many bad ideas about how much suffering people go through studying for GRE for over 2 months. So following Kapeesh and Rohit’s posts about how to do well in the GRE (if you have about 60 days and are absolutely kaam-dhanda less), here are a few things you could do in case you want to put in minimal effort and still salvage a decent score.
Verbal:
-Do NOT do anything more than Barrons . It has a brilliant wordlist and literally no more than 3-4 words come from outside it. Five days is not enough time to mug up the dictionary. Just stick to Barrons.
-The exercises in Barrons are quite pointless. They all are very basic and very different from the stuiff the actually ask in the GRE. Do NOT waste time solving them. Instead solve Dilip Oak’s material (if you can get your hands on it)
Quantitative:
As Rohit says ” GRE IS CRAP, it tests 7th std maths” and as Kapeesh says “Aiming for anything less than 800 here is unacceptable.”
Seriously , I thought i was gonna get screwed in the DI section because i kept making stupid mistakes , but it really is very simple. Most of you will be able to get an 800 in your sleep.
Also , do not sit solving the Barrons maths. It is very simple and there are qute a few wrong solutions. You are likely to get complacent and also replace your good concepts with incorrect ones. Instead solve the entire maths practice section in the ETS powerprep.
AWM:
Here’s an helpful tip. If you are writing your first serious essay after your 12th standard board exam , the GRE is NOT the place to do it. Trust me. It doesn’t work! Write at least 2 essays before your GRE to get into the groove and remember your phak-ing skills. And you should draw up points for about 5 issue topics and 5 arguments.
