Siby Kuriakose

"With two cats in the yard, life used to be so hard" "Now everything is easy because of you"

What a life! i'm sure every cat lover has envied the lives of these lazy creatures This is the first in the series of videos featuring my pets that i' m going to post ( blame it on digital video capture on a phone, simple and most importantly cheap!)

This is a restaurant tucked away in between the busy streets of Gandhinagar in Bangalore. It's definitely not haute cuisine, but if you wanted a taste of the everyday gruel that most Kanandigas enjoy, it's the best place. Located on the road parallel to the national market road (can't recall the name now!), the name that most people know the restaurant by is practically invisible and is overshadowed by the prominently displayed ‘G M Boarding & Restaurant’. If you weren't looking for it you could mistake it for one more of the cheap and ubiquitous darshinis/fast food joints that populate the city and give it the go by. The walls are dirty and there is a large hall with three rows of 4-seater tables. You are encouraged to share tables with strangers, if you're group with less than four members, we ended up sharing ours with a constable taking his lunch break. Steel plates with rounded edges are already placed on the table. A server comes around with hot water whic...

A genre that is not as popular as most ardent lovers like me would like it to be. The beauty of the stand up act is that it's one person holding everybody in rapt attention and eliciting constant bouts, if not a continuous stream of laughter, an artificial emotion. Why do I say that? What do horror movies achieve? At best, they scare you out of your seat. That’s actually easy, not the writing bit though (Stephen King is a personal favourite), because the most primal of emotions is fear. Humour on the other hand is an emotion of the civilized animal, something to do with the neo mammalian brain, apparently. Jackasses obviously do not count, because that’s only a metaphor. Seinfeld was the first stand up that I was very taken with. The little snippets the standup act that appeared before and after the TV series. One of my favourites, was the one about dogs, humans and alien visitors (watch it!). Then I came across Eddie Izzard, an instant favourite was born. The British cross-dresser...

The most valuable attribute of the camera on a mobile phone is the ease with which you can whip it out at opportune moments and unobtrusively capture them for posterity. Like the picture on the left. This is real! and was taken at a cafe in Bangalore. I love these bloopers, always a good laugh. If you're straining to read it, item 55 under 'desserts' reads 'Blood Merry Ice Cream'. Now unless the place is frequented by vampires, i can't imagine mere mortals being interested in such gory fare. Idi Amin maybe or the infamous Nithari bunch? Have to watch 'The Last King of Scotland'

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Yes! Managed to squeeze in the time to see it before it vanished from the screens. The tale of Gurukant Desai; unapologetic manipulator and hardened entrepreneur. Mani Ratnam as always is the master of story telling with his signature shots and picture perfect scenes. His choice of Abhishek Bachan for the role of Gurukant Desai is dwarfed only by the choice of Mithunda for that of the fiery editor Manik Dasgupta of 'The Independent'. An unabashedly inspired movie despite what the disclaimer says, it draws heavily on the life of Dhirubhai Ambani and his extraordinary rise in the world of money making. It chronicles the struggle from his peasant origins , through the adolescent years in Turkey as a petrol attendant, the entrepreneurial trials in post independence but still colonial Bombay and the eventual ascendancy to national iconic status as the chairman of Reliance..oops.... Shakti Group. The director has tried to walk the fine line between either deifying or vilifying this f...

The primary reason to go for this movie was because we didn't get tickets for "The Guru'. Mani Ratnam is an all time favourite. Having not been able to see it for this long after the release was a torture indeed. Heck tried Inox and PVR but as usual if you don’t plan in advance for the weekend you don’t stand a chance of getting tickets at either of the multiplexes. Here's a lesson for marketers, in the long run the mall which has a multiplex that shows the largest variety of good movies will be the one chosen by the public and all the stores in the mall will benefit from the associated business. Think I should give this theory a name, Good Movies, More Footfalls! Anyways, the movie at hand, Traffic Signal-Directed by Madhur Bandarkar , Starring Konkona Sen. These are truly the only two names I knew and the only ones that stood out also, the others have done a decent job at best. The idea of interspersing stories and pushing the plot is an interesting ploy. You get the...

Ok. This would be a nice topic to blog about only because so many people would be searching for this tag. That! Without doubt is the greatest accomplishment of this entire hullabaloo. As the story unfolds, it’s fascinating to see the players jumping in to generate as much as noise as possible. I live in India; we don’t get the British Channel that’s airing Big Brother and are definitely not part of the 4.5 million that’s tuned into the show post the melodrama of the past week. Why are we up in arms? because a celebrity is also not protected against racial abuse. Come on! Racism is a reality in this multicultural globalized world. I’m reminded of a question I saw posted in a forum, the aspiring Indian student wanted to know from the moderator as to which of the American Universities were most tolerant to Asian students. Not which was completely rid of racist abuse, but which of the temples of learning was the least of the evils. The moderator surprised everyone with his answer, he said ...

Saw this in TOI on 29th December 2006. Blog Blah Himani Dalmia All this hype about Web 2.0, the new generation of Internet services, where dotcom is so last season and Wiki is not just a funny word, seems to overlook the fact that blogging and online collaboration are just ways to give mindless drivel a free hand. First, let's take blogs themselves. Who wants to read pages of claptrap by some Johnny-got-empowered with detailed expositions on subjects like his favourite fruit or things he feels guilty about? Even the few sensible bloggers out there receive such dippy responses that it's a wonder they find the strength to go on writing. The blogosphere is like an overcrowded city where people streak down the street naked and complete strangers thrust pamphlets in your face. It thrives on reverse voyeurism, the instinct that makes you secretly hope someone will peep through the window while you shower. Here, one doesn't need to convince a TV producer or editor that what you ha...