Sometimes, you come across a song that has so simple and yet profound meaning that they make you pause. Let’s talk about one such song today. The song is called ordinary love. & it’s from U2, the greatest rock band of this (and previous) generation (you can debate me later.). Anyways, the song is written in honor of Nelson Mandela. It starts with, The sea wants to kiss the golden shore The sunlight warms your skin All the beauty that's been lost before Wants to find us again What beautiful imagery.

You might have heard the name of Martin Luther King and even heard his famous “I have a dream” speech. But did you know how the civil rights movement started? It started like this: Montgomery, Alabama. December 1, 1955. Early evening. A public bus pulls to a stop and a sensibly dressed woman in her forties gets on. She carries herself erectly, despite having spent the day bent over an ironing board in a dingy basement tailor shop at the Montgomery Fair department store.

Regrets are the tollbooths of human life. Just like tollbooths, regrets stop us from whatever we are doing and exacts a price from our time & emotional energy. To me, living without regrets seems almost impossible. It seems to me that if we went in search for a man who had no regrets, we would never end our search. And if we do find one, I can safely say that we have found the most ignorant fool on earth.

It’s been long time since I wrote a blog. And there’s so much going on around the world and in my life that I don’t get time to write. I’ve been trying to focus my writing on current affairs but to my horror no affair seems to be current for more than a week. I’m like, “Hold on! Think about this for a moment.” But nobody’s listening. Everybody has moved on to the next big controversy.

Today, I was commuting to office via BRTS. As usual, the bus was crowded, especially near the door. I don’t know why but there seems to be some type of strange force at work in the BRTS because people to gather right next to the door even if the rest of the bus is empty. As the bus came near the stand, the people were queuing up to leave because the bus was nearing their destination.

I’m studying and working. Plus, working in a field that is changing everyday. Everyday something becomes obsolete and without learning something new, one’s skillsets can become obsolete very fast. And then, I like to do a lot of reading outside of my field. What this means is, I have to be on top of a lot of information. I have to keep track of it. I have to revise it periodically.

And then we come to the final topic. The topic of directing. The toughest. Let’s dive right in! Conceptual integrity In the writing part, I told you something about the infinite resources of dreamland. However, did you know that there are a thousand dream-lands? Each unique. With it’s own different style and atmosphere? Well there are. So, in my opinion, the first task of a director is to let the actors in, into his dreamland.

There isn’t much to talk about in topic of sound editing ( <- that last statement is meant to show you how ignorant I am… ) except a few things. Let’s go over them quickly… Audacity That’s what I used to do the editing. It’s a pretty good piece of software which supports unlimited number of tracks. Also, the interface is pretty easy to understand. It took be about 5 minutes to get up to speed and start editing the audio.

This post is part of the Jingles of Christmas series. In this post, I discuss the lessons I learned about recording the dialogues. Read on! Shooting a moving target As I discussed in the post before this one, I didn’t have a concrete script. So, there were a few modifications made into the skit plot. A few of them happened after the recording was over. So, I had to record the dialogues again for the changed parts.

NOTE: When I started writing this post, I didn’t think that it would get so long. So, I’m gonna do it in 4 parts. Each one focused on one particular topic. Writing, recording, sound editing and directing. This one will be focused on skit writing. This Christmas, we had ICPF outreaches in schools. Of which I had the privilege to be a part of. The preparations for this programs started just a couple of weeks ago and I had the opportunity to write a skit to perform.

For approximately a year now, I have been using Awesome as my window manager. It’s great. A few months ago, I was using Luakit as my primary browser when Firefox got in frenzy of releasing new versions of their browser which demanded more and more memory from my computer which it didn’t have. But, what these two amazing pieces of software have in common? Lua. I was introduced to Lua when I configured my awesome window manager.

For past few weeks I’ve been involved in a debate in one internet discussion forum. The subject is, “Why do people believe in God?”. Since, I am a believer, I thought, let’s join in. Let’s see what happens. So, I presented my reasons in a simple manner. Starting from the cosmological argument, then to the intelligibility of the universe, then history and finally my own experience. However, since I entered the discussion, it has really heated up.

Warning: This is a radioactive braindump. Reading further might hurt your brain. Now that’s aside, I’d like to talk about one of the things that I’m biased about. I’m biased about biases. My bias is, everyone is biased. And, there are right biases, wrong biases and ugly biases. So the first question that comes into my mind is, what the heck does these terms mean? I’m going to assume that everyone knows what is bias.