kirukkal.com

Nokia 6600’s the hero in Cellular. Was suprised to see this headline. Cellular is a hollywood flick that released last week in the US.

According to The Wall St. Journal article, the Nokia 6600 is central to the film’s dark storyline, which portrays both the best and worst features of cellphones. Kim Bassinger plays a mother who is kidnapped, locked in a room — and manages to make one random cellular call — from a rotary dial phone that was smashed by the kidnapper. She reaches a random individual, played by Chris Evans, who drives around Los Angeles trying to help her. And here’s the twist, Ryan must overcome common wireless frustrations, including poor signals, a low battery and inadequate customer service, to save her. In the process he is stuck with rude sales people while he stopped at a shop to buy a charger. Read More.

HP ran more than 4 pages of Ads on their range of computer systems in The Economic Times, Chennai edition. No idea why so much on a single day ?

Zoom, the to-be introduced mass niche channel(read commercial) of Times Network has ads all over the Times dailies. Zoom is planned to be aired on the third week of this month. Don’t know if our local guys at chennai have any plans for the CAS subscribers. Read more in the India Television site.

This column of GV Krishnan in Zine5 is noteworthy. Starting from rounded pencils, washing machine sounds to heavy metal music, the strange habbits of writers required while writing, truly amuses. I remember, Writer Sujatha mentioning in one of his columns that there are such oddities in a writer’s life and the only thing he always required was the compulsion of a deadline to write.

Art Buchwald, they say, cluttered his office with something else – bundles of fan mail, with the most interesting among them stuck on the office walls. Among the certificates that found wall space were the ones that said – ‘Are you a writer or an idiot?’, ‘You stink,’ and ‘We girls think you most contemptible; go to hell.’

The above are the lines from the column Recipe for Writing : First, Get a washing machine. I laughed thoroughly. Read More.

This Illayaraja album on Ramana Maharishi was one of my favorites. Simply because of the maestro’s devastating divine voice and it’s metaphysical lyrics that goes beyond ones grasp. One song called Bhikshai Paathiram Yendhi Vandhen is the highlight, atleast for me. We had this tape in our house and it was a part of my routine to listen to it before I would leave to my college. Over years, the tape worn out and was completely unfit to be played on a audio system of any sort. I had bought this when I had been to Thiruvanaamalai.

With CDs occupying the shelves these days, our old Philips Powerhouse was to be thrown out. To keep it alive, yesterday, I had to take the tape recorder for a service. I remembered this song of Illayaraja, by a chance. Today I had been to the store looking for this same CD/tape. When I asked if I could get Rajavin Ramanamaalai, the sales woman asked me to come tomorrow. All the time, I was thinking that this cassette would be out of existence as I haven’t heard/read people talking about it, ever. But to my surprise, she said a complete new stock of those CDs have just come and they are still taking inventory. She also asked me to come tomorrow itself, the tomorrow was stressed. When she told this album of Raja was one big hit and everytime they get a new stock, they run short of it in couple of days, I couldn’t believe.

While I had no surprises with the album’s musical quality, I was quite surprised that it was still a major hit. Some people’s music last long. Illayaraja stands first among equals.