What's with this weather ?

This has to be the worst summer *ever*. Is it global warming or the hordes of politicians performing Yagnas ? Per the Times of India, all the hopefuls from the heavyweights to the chillare are out uttering mantras and making offerings to Agni till their eyes bubble. Happening on such a large scale( factchecker: please insert number of hopefuls here), it cannot but make Al Gore wring his hands and weep.

The light, too, has an eerie end-of-days quality...although that may very well be because someone has parked a translucent plastic sheet on the skylight. I've been thinking, what can I do to help make things better ? Because I'm sure you will agree that its not just my back-from-California airheadedness talking, this truly is an awful state of things.

After scratching my head, pretty much the only thing I was able to come up with was - terrace gardens. {Pause for a rant on architecture in Bangalore : why does every building in Bangalore look like a jail ? The lack of imagination in everyday constructions is completely appaling and contributes to the impression of a concrete hell}. Read this article in Time Magazine that talks about Chicago's initiative to green itself by planing rooftop gardens. This isn't just your plants-in-a-pot kind of thing, it's a far more ambitious plan that includes literally growing plants on your rooftop.

now will this lead to buildings collapsing ? Not sure... I bet there's some kind of downside. But it sure is a wonderful vision - ugly concrete head-radiating rooftops, replaced by cooling green bowers. Sigh.

Every morning I listen to this radio station that plays an assortment of Hindi and Kannada songs.

Couldn't help but notice how many Kannada songs Udit Narayan, Kunal Ganjawala and Sonu Nigam (all primarily Hindi singers) sing nowadays. It gladdens my heart and my heart swells with .. (whatever hearts swell with under these circumstances - painted myself into a corner while writing that phrase and am too lazy to reconstruct it correctly) to see this crossing of boundaries between Bollywood and Sandalwood (which believe it or not is the unofficial name of the Kannada film industry - got to know from a Quiz I attended recently).

Now that the political correctness is done, I can speak the truth without fear! These songs sound so so funny when these guys sing them!! I cannot get Udit's "gubbachi goodi nalli" out of my head!!! And then these guys not only pronounce every single letter and sandhi from Kannada they even add their own Bollywood like endings to every raaga which sound out of place in Kannada Songs. They literally sing Kannada in Hindi!

Wonder if the Kollywood guys feel the same way (thats the Tamil film industry BTW, named as such after Kodambakam apparently).

It would be nice to hear Tamil being spoken in Hindi for a change, which brings me nicely round to another topic (maybe another post) of how many people I have had speaking English in Tamil to me.. I think I will post a set of words that I had so much difficulty in recognising as being English in my next post. I could have sworn they were Tamil.