A scientific conference or a band competition?

Recently I have been to a scientific conference. I am not going to disclose the name and location of the conference since I plan to stay in academics at least for the next four years and this particular conference was attended by quite a few big names in the field. As the matter of fact, I might get into  trouble just by writing this piece and posting this online. However I am still going to do it since I am a brave old cowboy and (in a southern USA accent),  “I am scared of nothin!”. To be honest, I am bored in the train back home and I need to practice my typing.

Before I start with the experience  of the conference, I will talk a little about my experiences of going to “band competitions”, also known as “battle of bands” in some parts of the world. A bunch of bands register to these competitions by sending in recordings of songs that they have written, in other words demos. There is usually a selection committee which comprises “more experienced” musicians who screen these demos and come up with a list of bands that they would like to invite to the competition to play. They bands come to the competition venue and present/perform their songs and then there is a panel of judges who judge these performances and the bands get prizes based on their performances. Usually there is a best band award along with a few others like best vocalist and best keyboardist and so on and so forth.

I have been playing in bands for around ten years now and I have won only two band competitions. If I had won more, then I would spend more time in recording studios rather than sitting in trains writing shit, but I am in a train writing shit. Anyway, my complete failure as a musician would be talked about in another post.  This one is about conferences.

I guess by now I have given you a vague idea of how band competitions work. A very surprising thing about the selection for the best band and best guitar player etc. is that the prize winners are always somehow connected to the famous musicians in the city/music scene. I have hardly seen an exception to this and of course the two times my band won, we were hanging out with the people from the local music scene a lot.

The conference which made me write this post was my first conference and to be honest I could be totally wrong in my judgement (which I hope I am). However there is always the possibility of me not being wrong. The conference started off by scientists and students sending their papers to the conference and a selection committee consisting of “experienced scientists” selecting the papers and authors that they would like to invite for a talk. The selected authors had to pay a certain amount of money as fees for the conference and after paying, they could go to the conference venue and present their papers. After the conference was over, there was also a judging committee which gave out awards to the best paper and so on and so forth, and surprisingly (or not) all the papers that won any sort of award had a big name associated with it. Does that sound a little similar to my experience about band competitions? It might, but its still not conclusive evidence to say that these two events (or types of events) are similar. However there is more.

Thought the format of a band competition and a scientific conference, in terms of organisation is quite similar, the similarity becomes uncanny when one compares the nature of the content (music in one and scientific content in the other), and the way the audience (which comprises other musicians and scientists respectively), behave to this content. In case of band competitions, the audience loves the music that is either playing in the radio or in popular TV channels like MTV and VH1 at that particular time (This is earlyy 200s and there was no Spotify providing us with personalised playlists every Monday morning). When I was playing at these competitions, the popular bands were Limp Bizkit and Linking Park, some heavy metal stuff and so on. It was the period of shit music (yes I said shit music and if you like Linkin Park and Limp Bizkit then I am sorry to say that you need to work on that music taste of yours, but that’s just my opinion) from the late 90s and early 2000s. Honestly I am so glad that the members of these bands are slowly dying or just deciding to do other things like open restaurants and stuff. I mean even Nicky Minaj (though debatable) is better than Limp Biskit. However we did not feel that way back in the early 2000s during the band competitions. Whenever I would see a band playing a Linkin Park song, there would be a lot of people banging their heads to it and if a band wanted to be unpopular, the trick was to play something that the public was not that aware of. For example a dude could be playing some doors or playing the solo of Sultans of Swing even better than Mark Knopfler, people would still go to those horrible musicians dressing up like Fred Durst and jumping on stage like its a chimpanzee gymnastic show rather than playing music. Still the later were the cool guys since they won the heart of the public.

People in the scientific community are not very removed from the long haired teenagers listing to Fred Durst. This particular community, at this particular point of time, meaning early 2018, loves the topic of Machine Learning and Deep Learning. There were a lot of papers presented in the conference, however whenever there was a paper which used Deep Learning to solve any problem (some were pretty useless problems, like separating bananas from oranges), people just go crazy about them and of course those are the papers are the ones which won at the end.

My train is arriving at the Stuttgart station in ten minutes and I have to get off. I could write a little more about the inferences but I rather let you infer whatever you wanna infer from this. As an ending note I wanna say that I have nothing more to say.

Jazz Guitar 0

Alright. I am no jazz great but I sure do want to be one (actually I want to be any sort of great person but given a choice I would like it to be with music (and they told you that beggars can’t be choosers eh!!)). Getting back to Jazz. I started playing guitars quite a while back and for some reason (most probably since I am an un-modern moron), I loved the blues. I remember playing really bad blues and getting very frustrated. I went to many guitar teaches and websites to learn the blues and after a while (somewhat around 10 years) I got to a point where I don’t piss people off in the first minute that  pick up a guitar.

Now I could go on with blues and learn more but honestly I got bored with playing the same thing over and over again (blues fanatic, this is your cue to start saying shit to me), and coincidentally (or not ?) I started listening to JAZZ. This word was always a mystery to me (and still is). It brings up images of bearded and bespectacled women and men (trying to be funny here) with glasses of expensive liquor (or apple juice. As a child I thought that whiskey was apple juice), understanding and enjoying the sophisticated yet hallucinogenic form of music. Being bearded is very important. I started playing some jazz songs (i later learned that what I was playing are called jazz standards) just as I had started to play blues. I searched for songs online and tried to play them from the tabs and software, but I found that he chords are EXTREMELY difficult. They were so difficult that I lost interest in the entire form of music, until two or some years ago I went to a jazz jam session with a friend of mine.

Damn, this is not about me. This is about music. So I am going to shut up and get to the point. How to stat playing jazz guitar?

Step 1: Stupid as it may sound, the most important part of playing jazz (or any improvised music for that matter) is listening. so get a bunch of jazz songs in the instrument that you are going to practice jazz an and listen to them. If you don’t like listening to the songs you selected, then mos probably you don’t like jazz music (or you need to listen to it in another instrument). In such a case try some other forms of music or other instrument. It is extremely important to find a form of music and instrument that you are ABSOLUTELY comfortable with listening. (I sound like a preacher. damn!!!)

Step 2: Now that you have heard all the jazz songs possible with your instrument (and you are not 154 years old), you can start with he instrument. From here onward, I am going to get more technical about some music terminology and I would specifically switch to playing jazz on the guitar. I would also talk about some theory which of-course is applicable to any instrument.

One thing I would like to mention before I go on is the fact hat I am not a music student and I never was. As a result I might make theoretical, conceptual and practical mistakes in whatever I write or post here.  I would appreciate it if you as a reader would correct such mistakes if you find them. In general, this series of posts is meant to be an easy-going theoretical and practical guide for rock/blues musicians who wan to start playing Jazz. I m also doing this so that I can document all the lessons that I take and share the knowledge to the people. So happy Jazzing (??).

Y u no Grammar?

Good morning people. That statement depends on which time zone you are currently in but I couldn’t be bothered mentioning the rest of the greetings used throughout a day. So just a plain old good morning. Actually I just realized that its afternoon where I am at. This futile paragraph shows that we spend a significant part of our existence thinking about unnecessary things which theoretically could be optimized but to hell with optimization. So let’s talk about today’s post. I am again dissatisfied with a certain aspect or phenomenon in our world and I am going to rant about it here. I think, some of you would have started to find a pattern in this blog. I just get pissed of about things and write about it here. Wow so much for a pattern!! Anyway today we are going to speak about grammar.

Grammar, in my opinion, is what makes a language understandable. Now, though I know that there are a lot of definitions of Grammar and explanations of what it actually is, I think its nothing other than a set of rules which when applied to another set of words, makes it possible to express logical statements. However, this post is not about what grammar is, it is about learning grammar and the reasons why that might be important.

My earliest memories of leaning grammar (I honestly think that the spelling of grammar should be “grammer” and not “grammar”) is filling out prepositions in unfinished sentences from a book called “Wren and Martin”. It was an okay book but I think it could have been a little more interesting if it had some other things. Like a story or something tucked in between those pages of present and past tense examples. I mean, how long can you be interested in discrete sentences without any context?
One of the main reason we lean languages is to tell stories. That is also one of the shortcomings of the popular language learning app called DuoLingo. Although its a great app and it helped me learn a lot, after leaning how to say “I am eating an apple” in German and French, when I started with Spanish, I was really hoping for a follow up sentence like “The apple tastes good”. I didn’t get that from DuoLingo and neither from Wren and Martin. That is one of the reasons I get bored of grammar sometimes. Nevertheless I still think grammar is an inevitable part of communication.

Today morning when I was watching this video in youtbe about tenses, I came across this app called Grammarly (if that ain’t irony). Its beautiful. Its corrects your grammar, spelling and even suggests new and better words when you are writing. It makes your emails better and your applications read like they have been written by someone who took did their doctor studies in grammar and so on and so forth. I also love the way they advertise this product. “Write the future.”

However one thing that Grammarly misses out is that its really not helping the creative part of writing if everyone uses words from a normalized pool of words. The world would have never had any variance if everyone spoke and wrote with the same grammar and set of words. What I find even worse about these sort of apps is the way we are using them to pave the way towards a stupider future. Basic grammar required for writing an email is not so hard that we need an computer to assist us. Our brains have a humongous calculative and storage capacity and using that its easily possible to learn the basic grammatical structure of up to ten languages, but still people choose to use apps like Grammarly. While I completely agree that computer science is amazing and finding out how to make computers think like humans is also fascinating but its simply sad how the common human is slowly surrendering his or her capacity to think or perform because there is an app to do it.

I think all of you have heard idealistic rants like this before, and to be honest none of this makes any difference to the future. This could just be a part of evolution where the human brain slowly dies out (would take half a million years at least), to paves the way for the next ruling species whatever that might be, humanoids, gigantic turtles with most of their computing power in their ball-sacks hanging from their chins (I admit that I watch Rick and Morty) or plain old dogs with guns.

 

What is the point of this post? I don’t know. Just don’t use Grammarly or any app which corrects your grammar. Learn it, because we can and after a point of time it’s actually fun.

I finally changed my name

Well I don’t know if you remember me or all the bull that I write about sometimes, but in case if you do, you might remember that a couple of months ago I had started talking about how social media befriended me and things like that. I actually might be mistaken about what I am saying about my previous post, since I haven’t read it in a while. However, I finally ended up changing my name in Facebook and I wanna tell you why I did that and why you might also consider doing that.

Shit happens! We know that, we write it on tee shirts and caps and other places and have famous movie stars say it in their famous movies. What I mean to say is that we know that shit exists and shit confronts us from time to time and we can’t really do much about that. Now shit confronted me yesterday. I was in a club doing things people do in clubs (whatever that means) and I had kept my jacket with some other jackets thinking that, “Ohh, there are a lot of jackets here. I think mine will be safe if I just put it down here. After all who steals a jacket?”. Now change your name or not change your name, please do not think like me and put your jacket with other jackets in a club. IT WILL BE STOLEN/LOST. Even if it doesn’t happen the first time, it will. So what do you do when its cold, and you just lost your jacket and you are in club with all these smoke machines smoking you like a salmon? I don’t know what you would do but I got very angry and upset.

Don’t get me wrong, I did not hit anyone or shout at anyone and then get kicked out by the bouncers (I think they are called bouncers since they have big bellies (apparently this is the plural of belly and in spite of googling this I am not totally convinced) on which you probably could bounce).
So I was angry in the club after my jacket got stolen and I just logged in to dear old Facebook and wrote what I wanted to say to everyone in the city. I wanted to shout “Fuck you” into everyone’s ear, like EVERYONE in the world and that includes you too, and my dumb way of doing it was posting it in Facebook. Wait now you might be thinking, “What an anus? What did I do that this guy wants to be so rude to me?”. If you are actually thinking about that, then don’t. I am just generalizing this and that generalization unfortunately includes you. So just ignore the random “Fuck you”. A detour thought. Imagine that humans had the power of saying “Fuck you” to everyone’s ears when they are really upset. Man, everything that we would hear is “Fuck you”s. Or maybe it could like the “Super Like” thing in Tinder. We get just one each day and pay for more. Whatever.

So the night ended in me getting a Kebap and shivering all the way back home. Certainly not the way I had planned it to end, but it did feel good to reach out to my one thousand or so friends (of whom I probably know only one hundred people properly). Then I slept. Beautiful.

Today in the morning a couple of friends called me up or texted me to make sure that I was okay (they had read my Facebook post). Its actually one of them who told me to write about this and forget about it. I really appreciate that and if you people are reading this, a big “Namaste Sign Emoji” (couldn’t put the real one since I have to pay to upload the WP Emoji plugin. Business right??). Another friend of them pointed out that if I keep on shouting “Fuck you”  from Facebook, it really makes no difference. On the contrary its really bad for my persona, because my current/future employers may read that and totally judge me according to that and fire me or not offer me a position and then I won’t be able to pay my rent, so my landlord would kick me out, and then I would go to hotel (because I need a place to stay) and become a depressed alcoholic (because I would be depressed and drinking is fun) and spend all my money on hotel bills and booze and then I would have no more money for food, and finally  I will starve and die.  I thought about it for a while and it didn’t really cheer me up. So I removed the posts from Facebook as I could not bear to see the image of me shivering and dying on a pavement. Would be pretty funny though.

After that finally I changed my name. I know that it really does not make much of a difference and people would still be able to track me down in Facebook and all the other social media platforms, but nevertheless I did it since it reduces the chances of my personal social media (a sort of an oxymoron in itself. I like the word oxymoron, reminds me of oxygen and a very stupid person) popping up somewhere I don’t want it to. That’s it. Think about it and change your name in Facebook, since you dont want your boss to know what you think about whatever.

That’s all that I wanted to talk about.

I have to change my name (Pt. 1)

I really have to change my name, at least in all the social networking sites that I have a profile in. Before I tell you people the reason I want to change my name, I would like to talk about how social networking became a part of my life back in high school.

I think if I calculate the number of years that I have graduated from school, I would be able to tell you the exact year that I am talking about, but I am not going to do that. Let’s say its somewhere between 2004 to 2005. I was either in the 9th or the 10th grade, furiously trying to be one of the coolest kids in my class. For some reason everyone who was a senior, I mean EVERYONE, was cooler that everyone my age. I think its a social norm in our culture that everyone who is older to you has to be respected even if the person is a complete moron. Its called “Dadagiri”, but that’s not the topic today.  I might write about it later if I am adequately pissed off with it.
As I was saying everyone who was older was cooler than people my age. There used to be these couple of friends of mine who used to hang out with these older kids, and I really tried to hang out with them, since that would make me cool automatically. I think I was always somewhere in between them and the other them but  I did get introduced to a lot of things from this company that I kept. One of the things was Orkut.

What is Orkut? That was, understandably enough, the first thought in my head when I heard about it. I didn’t have high speed internet at my place then but we did have cyber cafes where people would go to surf the internet and to “do Orkut”.  Out of context, but I have never drunk a coffee in a cyber cafe and have never seen anyone else drinking a coffee there as well. It seems like they would have got the same amount of business if they named it “Cyber”, but my unsuspecting mind thinks that adding “cafe” after   “cyber” made it sound way cooler. There were something between one million twenty two thousand and four “Cyber Cafes” in Kolkata at that time. I don’t know why I wrote that, but it was fun writing a number down in words.
Anyway this friend of mine and I went to this “cyber cafe” and he showed me his Orkut profile. I remember being crazy jealous of this guy. He had this cool thing called Orkut and actually had a webpage with his name and photo in it. He had a bunch girls talking to him and exchanging photos, and friend requests and testimonials and what not.

 I didn’t show that I was desperate to get a profile in Orkut, but on the way back home I went to another internet place (I a going to call “Cyber cafes”, “Internet place” from now on since I have always hated the term “Cyber cafe”) and registered a profile with Orkut. I felt really good for about 3 and a half seconds while the page was refreshing, but just as the basic registration was over I was bombarded with a million questions about my age, hobby, colour of my pubic hair etc. I know that I don’t enjoy working on almost anything but seriously that felt like a really big task and I decided to take it slow. I left for the day and thought that I would build up my profile in the course of the week. So started my online existence.

An ode to handwriting

Its funny that I always get thoughts, strange thoughts, while watching Satyajit Ray movies. Maybe I should rename this blog as “Thoughts that I get while watching Satyajit Ray movies”, but its too long and I want to live up to my reputation of being lazy. So I wont. Nevertheless, I am going to tell you about my thought.

This time it was Charulata. A classic. To be honest the movie starts off in a very idyllic setting. British India, rich people, political newspapers etc. Though I was thoroughly enjoying the scenario, I wasn’t really thinking of anything. But at one point, one of the protagonists takes a book and starts writing in Bengali. He uses a quill, carefully and slowly dips it in ink, careful that it doesn’t stain the paper in a way he doesn’t want it to and writes beautifully. I was shocked at the beauty of handwriting. Every word, every letter different from the other, and it made me think about the last time I read someone’s handwriting.

I couldn’t remember. I couldn’t remember the last time I saw my father’s or my mother’s handwriting or any friend’s handwriting. Its funny that I am writing all this, but all throughout my life people always told me that my handwriting sucks. And I have no reason to say that they were mistaken. Sometimes even I couldn’t read my own handwriting. But it does feel a little awkward that we don’t use this art too often any more. Everything is print, everything is the same. Every letter, every space, every comma, every full stop, all the same. Every word looks beautiful, perfect, we have achieved our goal. However the beauty is lost. In a world where everyone is perfect, there is not much happiness in being perfect any more and though that world is easy to live in, would you, my dear reader like to live in it?

I propose a massive revolution where we break all keyboards, take a few days off and protest in the streets and start writing with quills and gets our hands dirty. Oh how beautiful! However I am not going to do that, and I don’t know anyone who will. Honestly its a waste of a revolution. So lets think about how we lost the art of writing and think about all the other small things that we are eventually going to lose.

When everyone is done thinking, I suggest sleep.

 

Life inside a clock

I couldn’t completely keep my word on writing here regularly, but now I am back here and it hasn’t even been  a week since my last post. Honestly I am okay with that. Sometimes you gotta take yourself the way you are, and I guess I am kind of lazy. Anyway, off with my unfocused blabbering mind.

Today I wanna talk about a “Grandfather’s Clock” that I saw in a Satyajit Ray movie called “Uttoron”. I am not sure if the rest of the world calls a grandfather’s clock a grandfather’s clock and so I googled it and found some decent images of the type of clock that I am talking about and I found a couple of songs with the same name.

The song is from back in the 19th century. I just prefer to remember song names from that era and not the people who composed it since its too much to remember. Of course I wouldn’t push a Mozart or a Dvořák out of my brain but I think you understand. Babbling again. Thank god, the song finally started playing. Its a detestable melody and I do not recommend it. You can try it just for the sake of ruining a nice morning/afternoon. Oh that horrible bassoon!! Johnny Cash’s version is much better but I can almost hear him cringe as he singing it. Sigh! Even Johnny Cash had to sing shit.

Back to the point. I want to talk about the beautiful attractive pendulums that these grandfather’s clocks have. They have a striking resemblance to a hanging tongue from a hanging man or woman and if you would want to stretch your imagination a little bit, a man or a woman who has been hanging for a while, let’s say two and a half days. I haven’t seen anyone hang for two and a half days and examined their tongues, but I assume that if I did, I would find out that they also move in a periodic motion, jut like the pendulum in the clock in this movie. Please don’t ask me to prove it, it’s just an assumption and has absolutely no scientific basis.

As I was watching the movie, I saw this beautifully carved pendulum moving inside the glass case of the clock. It kept on moving and that made me think that our lives are somewhat like these pendulums. Going on and on in an extremely periodic manner. Eating, sleeping, fucking and repeating, at least that’s what the hipster at the club said.
We try to enrich our lives with different things. Some people fill it with expensive things, some read books, some travel, some perform, some don’t do much at all, they just exist. However nobody gets to stop the pendulum. Think about it, have you ever seen a pendulum outside a clock? Well you would say,  “…well yes of course I have dum-dum.. “, but did it have any purpose? What good is a pendulum outside a clock? It can be a exquisitely carved pendulum or a very plain one, but it has to stay inside that glass box of the grandfather’s clock and tick, tock, tick, tock….

Well enough of that. I have successfully got myself depressed enough to stop writing. However I do like this, I mean writing and not pendulums. Honestly I haven’t seen a real pendulum in ages. I hope I come back to write some more.

Some Song That You Like

Its so hard when you are sitting down

At the end of the day

Surfing through the internet,

For a song that you like.

 

You already know some songs that you like

But you don’t wanna hear them tonight.

You just go to the next website

Still searching for the song that you like.

 

What happened to all the music out there?

There is surely something that will please you tonight

But god where is that perfect song?

The song that you like!

 

Maybe so many choices messed with your brain

Probably you wont like anything tonight!

But you are gonna do this again tomorrow

You would still be searching for the song that you like.

 

Collective Soul and Baroness

Finding out new music from the Internet or from friends has always been fun and interesting.It happens to me sometimes, that when I am really into the old Zeppelin, or the Beatles or AC DC, a kind of boredom settles in. I was going through one of these phases when i came across this kick-ass band called Collective Soul.Though it is a 1994 band, i had not heard of it before(my bad),so when i heard Gel for the first time, i was really blown away and found myself listening to it for at least sixteen times before i could think of anything else.Most of the early and mid nineties American bands that i have heard so far, had this typical sound with all those power chords spilt all over and no space for the guitarist to put in a couple of solos.Me being a guitar player brought up on Hendrix and Page have a kind of weakness toward solos.So in Collective Soul i found just what i was looking for.It has that semi modern feel to it and the guitar solos are just out of this world.Added to that the vocalist steals the show with his smooth tone and the right lyrics at the right time.Right now my favorite tracks are Gel and New Vibration.

Coming back to the age that we live in, there is this huge explosion of music everyday in this world.I happened to discover a small part of this explosion in the name of Baroness.Its a band formed somewhere in mid 2003, doing a very powerful yet mellowed down type of heavy metal.Don’t think that they lack the riffs and the guitar solos and the overall power that heavy metal delivers, but they present it in a way that’s actually soothing to the ears(think of a sober Mastodon without the growls). With three albums to their name- the Red Album(2007), The Blue Record(2009) and the Yellow and Green(2012), Baroness is surely on their way to create a name for themselves in the metal as well as rock music market.Take My Bones Away,Eula and March to the sea are the songs that i am humming these days.Check ’em out and see if the ‘Baroness’ is good enough for you!!!

Mother Of Riot

Get the peasants and get the laborers

And get all the god-faring murderers,

And the ones who think of higher goals,

Go back home,the leaders have won the poll.

Revolution will now be on air

Brainwashing all the ones who were there.

Green and orange will blow in the wind

And You will pay for our ancestors sins.

Oh the strong and the noble minded, don’t go ahead

Because you don’t know the strength of a thousand hands

United by the selfish words

Of the white coats and self proclaimed gods.

‘What can be done?’, the wise men despair

‘Has the world finally run it’s run?’,

I don’t have an answer my friends,

A rebel once beaten, may he rest in HELL.