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Incase you are a globe trotting blogoholic, and also have fair interest in the movies and the oscar and were wondering who is this guy A R Rahman, you have stumbled upon the right place. He is a Indian genius who composes music for the indian film industry. Most of us just go total fida over his compositons. I have put together a list of my favourites by the movie names, which proved to be quite a task. The list includes only his work for the Bollywood. There is a general notion that his work for the south indian film industry is even better.

1. Rangeela

2. Roja

3. Rang De Basanti

4. Swades

5. Slumdog Millionaire

6. Yuva

8. Jaane Tu Ya Jaane Na

9. Saathiya

10. Lagaan

11. Bombay

12. Dil Se

If you are ‘resourceful’ types, you will find his music on the web courtesy the rippers.

I have been living in Pune for the last 3 years, and since, had always wanted to attend the Sawai Gandharva. I had heard a lot about this, the preeminent gathering of the most gifted exponent of the Indian classical arts. This year it happened. It was by sheer chance though, over a rather mundane talk over coffee in the office. A colleague, upon my mention of Sawai Gandharva mentioned that it was happening the next weekend and volunteered to arrange a pass upon seeing my rather unexpected enthusiasm. I got the pass, paid Rs. 350 for it, in hindsight, worth every rupee. So now I had no excuse to postpone my desire to attend the festival.

I attended all the evening session. Sadly though I missed the performance by Pandit Bhimsen Joshi on Sunday, as it was not a scheduled performance. But, I can hardly complain, I got to see some of the most well know artist performing live. Over the course of the festival I have listened to Pandit Hariprasad Chaurasia, Pandit Jasraj, Aarti Tikekar, Murad Ali, Rahul Sharma, L Subramaniam, Sardeshmukh, Vijay Ghate. I was also mesmerized watching the fleet-footed Alarmel Valli performing Bharatanatyam. Honestly, I have no understanding of the classical music. I was just curious; I had a desire to attend such an event, just for the experience. I am glad I did.

I will say this though; these performances are not for everyone. The raagas can last for hours. And only if you are genuinely interested to explore this field will you be able to make it through.

All the performances that I attended, I enjoyed. The event is unlike any live performances that I have attended. The audience sits very quietly and just absorbs the music. Most of the time they are in a meditative state, I guess they converge all the energies/attention to their sense of hearing, taking in all of the sound of music. Of course, it helped that the pandals had Bose speakers all around, recreating the crisp sound. I must mention the exceptional sound setup (courtesy Swaranjali), complementing the artist perfectly. Another good thing about the event is that it held in December, when the pleasant winter is about to set it. Every day there is at least one well known artist performing, so it helps novices like me interested. The one performance that stood out for me was by Pandit Hariprasad playing the flute and his Jugalbandhi with a very talented tabla player Vijay Ghate. The crowd consisted predominantly of the seniors, but the younger generation made it’s presence felt.

The high point of this year’s was reached on Sunday afternoon, when I was told the rather feeble looking Pandit Bhimsen Joshi, also is loving called Panditji, to the delight of the lucky audience, took to the stage and sang at his festival. My colleague who is a regular told me people had tears in their eyes at the end of the performance. Panditji had made it a point to show up in the evenings at the festival, though he watched the performance from his car. So I was really amazed that he actually performed.

So if you are a patron of the classical arts, or just someone curious like me, if you are in Pune in early December, please take out time an attend the Sawai. Who knows, you might just enjoy this genre, I did!

The idea of writing a series like Human Technology provides me to reflect on my own journey through the IT age that is so central to my life. Technologies that have been featured so far on iRohit.com have today become so ingrained in our fabric that it’s easy to disregard the fact that till the mid nineties, most of us didn’t even know how a PC looked or what Windows was.

As I write this, the 4th chapter of my ongoing Human Technology series, I have to mention, none of the previous topics have brought a bigger smile on my face than this one. Before the BitTorrent, LimeWire, Kazaa; there was a lone pioneer, who unlocked the gates to a whole new world of sharing, sharing of music to be precise. Napster!

Napster was a brain child of 18 year old Shawn Fanning who I guess, was very passionate about his music, like most of us. But unlike most, he was brilliant with computers and coding. So he created a piece of software that would allow him and his colleagues to search and download the music of their liking from the computers on his college network. Little did he realize at that time that, what he had created was a piece of code that would change the music industry! We all are aware with the history of course. Napster changed the way we got our music. One was able to search for music on any computer located anywhere in the world and download it on to his computer. Foul, cried the music industry, but that didn’t stop this phenomenon of sharing music. Napster doesn’t even exist anymore. Well, definitely not in its original form. The original Napster has mutated into many things. Today’s it most successful form is the BitTorrent.

For many people, around the world, Napster provided a way to listen to music without actually owing it. It helped people to find that most obscure of artist in a jiffy. All it required was for some patient person to rip the cd and make mp3s of the album and share it. The copies then just grew in geometric progression. Today one can share not only music, but books, movies, software, documents, presentations, well almost any file on the computer. Of course there are legal suits going on, preventing such peer to peer sharing. But then that is a topic for another blog. The point of this blog is to acknowledge the place of Napster in Internet folklore. It added a whole new dimension to Internet. Music is one thing that unites the world, and sharing and finding music connected with the masses. As they say, ‘music is the food for our soul’ and I guess the entire world is hungry!

Incase you found this blog interesting, I would recommend you look at my other posts from the Human Technology series. Let me know which technologies touched you. I would love to hear you views.

Ok, continuing with the human technology series, the next thing application that I want to touch upon is Winamp. I had already mentioned it on the article about MP3. Winamp is the leader in mp3 players. I have been using it since, well since the beginning of the mp3 revolution. At that time it was the most readily available player. It was surprisingly simple to use. I believe that Winamp is one of the few softwares that follows the ‘KISS’ principle. Look at it, it’s UI matches the UI of any traditional music system. The ‘play’, ‘pause’ buttons, the graphical equalizers, the display. I think that’s what made it click. Playing mp3 was no different than playing you normal cd. Also there were added gimmicks like skins, and plugins that made it more personal. I really remember this one plugin that would attach speakers to the player. It was so cool. It also had all those 3D visualizations, which one could just watch while the music played. Winamp also stuck a cord with the internet community. It was easy on the resources. Never crashed. People developed some awesome add-on to it. All-in-all it just clicked like no other player. Every new release was an tracked, and instantly installed. The release of version 2 was a milestone. Today there are zillions of mp3 player. iTunes is probably the most popular. But Winamp still has maintained it’s distinct identity. Over the years it’s kept up with times, but its UI has remained consistent.

I have been using computers since 1997. It’s been 10 years since than. Today I have decided to share with you my views on some of the technologies, gadgets that I think have changed, touched our lives in more ways than we could ever imagine. I hope to do this over a period of time. Let me begin with my experience with them. I will try to be as chronologically correct as possible.
To begin with I will start with mp3. mp3’s is one of those things that if you think about it now, you would wonder how we ever lived without it before 1997. I was given a CD by a friend of mine. He told me that it contained 170 songs and I was like ‘WHAT???’. This was in when I was in college, when buying a CD was a five hundred rupee affair. I remember I hardly had any CD’s then. It would have to be a really amazing album for me to spend that kind of money on it. I normally used to buy cassettes. So imagine having 170 of the latest songs on a CD and being able to listen to it and they sounded no different to the actual CD. The first song that I listened to was I think ‘my heart will go on’ by Celine Dion. I am not sure, it was either this or ‘torn’ by Natalie Imbruglia. It was no easy task to convince my friend to allow me to take the CD for a day so that I could copy the ‘mp3s’ on my machine. And on the CD there was this software called ‘Winamp’. My friend told me that to listen to the songs I had to install this exe. To this day I listen to my mp3s using Winamp. Since that fateful day 10 years back, so much has changed in the way we listen to music and most of it thanks to mp3.
Today have gigabytes of mp3’s is so common. Mp3 have made listening to music so accessible. You can listen to it at work, while traveling, while working out. Most people that I know listen to music from mp3’s. I also want to mention that mp3 have made more music available to people. Today it’s possible to find and listen to the rarest of the rare music through the internet. Tracks from movies, original compositions from every nook and corner of this planet are available. I wonder sometimes if the people behind the mp3 codec ever thought that they were going to revolutionized music when they decided to work on that piece of code. I would like to know how they feel about this today.

He has become the most famous American Idol contestant I am sure. Why??? Because us, a billion Indians are aware of him. Well a billion might be an exaggeration ;) He is the one with the long hair if you are not sure whom I am talking about. All networks carry snippets of news about him, most related to his hair do, or his non existent singing talent. I donot really follow American Idol. But this one has got me interested. Most critics agree that Sanjaya can’t sing. But today I just happen to watch him perform a Latin song. And it was good. Simon Cowell reluctantly agreed with the other two judges. I am not sure if this was his best performance in the show or he normally performs this good. I suspect it’s the former. Anyways, I don’t see why Simon has made such a big issue that if Sanjaya goes on to wins, that he will not return to the show. The show asks audience to choose, and the general public in my opinion don’t understand the intricacies of singing. They will vote if 1) the guys looks good, 2)is an underdog or 3)evokes sympathy. These are sure shot ways of getting people on your side, in most situations is life. If the show wants to choose the best singer, then have people who understand music select the winner. Anyways, it will be interesting to see how this ends.