I did not know that about a nose line (huh?)

I have this horizontal line on my nose since I don't even remember when. I have always assumed it to be a feature which is something similar to a forehead line. Its pretty conspicuous on my nose, but I have never wondered about it or compared other noses to find out why. For me, it has always been a part of me :).

I've been having a sore throat for more than 2 weeks now and today I went to see the doctor about it. Well, it was diagnosed as a sinus infection, but this post is not about that. The doctor tried to confirm whether I had lots of allergies as a child. I did. I think I was allergic to parthenium which grew abundantly on unused site plots of Bangalore. I used to have bronchitis and used to get colds all the time. Then the doctor tells me that he knew that for certain that I had allergies and adds that its because of that line on my nose. According to him, when children have allergies and cold, they rub their noses all the time which supposedly causes a crease on the nose and later morphs into a horizontal line! The information left my mouth hanging open :).

Well, the nose line is still a part of me, but now I know how it became a part of me :-D .

I did not know that about songs..

One of the things that I constantly accept these days is that most of the Hindi film songs that I fall in love with are usually blatantly plagiarized from some unknown foreign country band. I mean, I can't believe that some of the Indian music composers are so dumb that they think the people wouldn't have listened to the original in these much much global internet times ;-). For example "Kya Mujhe pyar hai" from the film "Woh Lamhe" - I really loved the song when I first heard it, but felt a little bit letdown after finding out that its a copy of the song "Tak Bisakah" by an Indonesian band called Peterpan. I still love the song, but yeah it has lost its charm ;-). Another song is "Kaho na kaho" from the movie Murder which is the note-to-note copy of an Arabic song called "Tamally Maak" by Amr Diab. I prefer the Arabic one not only because of the voice, but because of the unmentionable actors in the Hindi version ;-) :-D.

Hence recent songs, unless by some exceptional music directors, can be written off as a copy from some corner of the world or another :-p. So its not a very big deal (more examples are "Dil mera churaya kyu" from "Akele Hum akele tum" which is a copy of "Last Christmas" by George Michael, "Nazare mili" from "Raja" which is a copy of "Come September" and so on). But now when it comes to olden melodies, we still respect many of the directors and composers as true masters and all of their songs are held to the utmost devotion. Yes, there were many songs there too "inspired" by western compositions, one major example (atleast for me its a major one because I love the song so much :-D), is "Itna na mujhse tu pyar bada" from the movie Chhaya which is very much inspired by Mozart's much admired "Symphony No. 40". Another inspired song I came to know about as I was writing this post was "Babuji Dheere chalna" from the movie Aar Paar, inspired by a spanish song "quizás, quizás, quizás", though it has only about 2 notes in common :-p. I'm sure there are many other olden goldies whose notes were influenced from the then famous music from around the world.

But what led me to this post was the song "Kaun hai jo sapno me aaya" from the movie "Jhuk gaya aasmaan" sung by Rafi.

As I have said a couple of times before, Rafi is my most favourite Hindi singer and this song has been one of my favourites for a long time. Well, you don't have to imagine my shock when I learnt the song was a copy of "Marguerita" by another of my all time favourite singers Elvis Presley!




I love Elvis's voice and I have a couple of songs by him I absolutely adore ("Love me tender", "Can't help falling in love with you", "Its now or never" etc :-D), but I hadn't heard of this one until I read about the plagiarism part :-p. The initial part is obviously a copy, but even the stanzas seem a lot similar :-p. Well the shock did wear off after a couple of days and now I have 2 similar songs that I love basically because of the singers - I cannot let go of either Rafi or Elvis ;-).

Do let me know if you know of more such "inspired songs" :-D.

I did not know that about actors..

The next post in my "I did not know that" series.

With internet so easily accessible these days, I have a habit (don't know whether its bad or good) of surfing IMDB whenever I watch a movie. I am a self-confessed over-thinking, over-analyzing person, so whenever I see a movie I like to find out what other people think of it, whether their views match mine etc. But this advantage I have of finding out more information about the movies/actors I have really liked has brought out quite a few surprises for me :).

For example, when I watched "The Matrix" for the first time, I recognized the actor who played "Agent Smith" immediately - I had seen him as the character "Douglas Jardine" in a cricket-based mini series called "Bodyline" and really admired his work in it. But I didn't know his name, at all. Even after 2 other sequels of matrix (which I watched in India before coming here) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy, I never even found out his name, the poor guy. Some months ago, Darsh and I were discussing the voices we love in English cinema (For eg, Morgan Freeman). I said I loved Alan Rickman's voice (the man who plays Snape in the Harry Potter series) and Darsh was talking about Hugo Weaving (who played a voice character in "V for Vendetta", I haven't watched that one btw). I literally asked him "Who the heck is Hugo Weaving?" and he was baffled to say the least. He was like "You say you love Douglas Jardine and Agent Smith and you don't know who Hugo Weaving is??". I was stunned to learn the name behind some of my most beloved characters, hehehee :).

This was not the first time that such a thing happened to me. The 2nd example is when I watched "The Sound of Music", I knew the actress was Julie Andrews, but didn't know the name of the actor who played Captain Von Trapp. I didn't really bother finding out then or remember it whenever I watched the movie on TV. About 2 years back, when I watched "Inside man" (a brilliant movie btw, if you haven't watched it yet) and was "researching" it on the internet, I ran across the character - Arthur case who was played by Christopher Plummer and didn't even recognize the actor who actually played Captain Von Trapp all those years ago! Imagine my surprise when I learned that he has been in many of my other favourite movies :).

The 3rd instance happened just a couple of days ago. I watched a crappy movie called "Dracula 2000" a long time ago on cable when I was still in India. Seeing how attractive the actor who played Dracula was, I was telling my friends that if this is how the real Dracula looks like, then I wouldn't really mind being bitten by him :-D. My friends can vouch for that, hehehee :))). As usual, never found out his name. A couple of days ago, I had just seen a movie of Gerard Butler, who, I have to confess, I really find quite attractive and was looking at his profile in IMDB. I was shocked to find out that he played the Dracula in the movie I watched, but it did bring a huggggggggge grin on my face :). Looks like my tastes haven't changed one bit :-D. Further, in that movie, Christopher Plummer also played one of the main characters!

To be honest, I don't mind such discoveries. Its nice to get these kind of surprises once in a while and think about, how come I never bothered finding out this before :). Which is the reason I started the series anyways ;-).

I did not know that about astronomy..

Did you know that you can take perfect photos of galaxies, nebulae and many other DSOs (Deep Space Objects) right from the earth? If you knew, kudos to you. Well, I did not.

I am a big fan of astronomical photographs. So much that "astronomy picture of the day" is my daily cup of tea. I always assumed that most of the photos of space were either from the Hubble telescope or some of the special satellites designed to take them. Well, assuming certainly made an ass outtta me :-D.

From the past couple of posts, you know that I was feeling down. I wanted to come back up and one way I thought I could do that was to immerse myself in the activities I love. I thought I would take photography classes or attend a photography workshop, but they don't have them in my town and the private lessons available in a nearby town are atrociously priced :-p. So next, I searched for an astronomy club and found one. While I was exploring through the site, I find the members' photo gallery section and thats when it hits me. Amazing photos taken by people right on earth!

The standard search on Google for more information revealed the term - Astrophotography. Suddenly it was as if the last puzzle piece clicks into place. Felt like a true calling. Felt like, hey thats what I always wanted to do, since I learnt the basics of astronomy (I gave up because of all the math, hehehee). I started reading more and more, getting more and more interested. Don't know how or when really, but I know I want to get into Astrophotography soon.

Its certainly not going to be easy. Astrophotography brings together 2 extreme things in photography and astronomy. It requires the knowledge of operating a high quality telescope (not to mention some knowledge of night sky) and a Digital SLR camera, both of which in turn take quite a bit of mastering. All these don't come very cheap either. Plus from what I have heard, its going to take years to get it right. Just pointing a camera into an eye-piece of a telescope will not get the perfect pics. So its going to be an expensive hobby if it is a hobby and I don't know whether my interest will be strong enough to go on for years and make it into some sort of a career. But right now, I am interested and I am excited.

I have decided to start off initially reading about photography, experimenting and then moving onto buying a digital SLR (which has been one of my all-time wishes). Meanwhile probably will also simultaneously explore buying a beginner's telescope (after going to a couple of meetings of the local astronomy club ofcourse) to learn and explore the possibilities. By then I should know whether I want to pursue this or not ;-). I have several good books on hold already and I can feel the impatience boiling in me ;-) :-D.

I know I am going to have lots of fun figuring it all out :). My only hope in all this is that this will make me look back on the bad phase in my life I have had for the past month fondly as a new beginning :).

I did not know that about leaf colours..

As you know from my blog, one of the things I really appreciate in myself is the curiosity I have regarding things especially when it comes to nature. But there are times when I am really amazed about something, but somehow am not the least bit curious about how it originated or what it is. This may be in matters of nature or anything in general. So, it ends up surprising me (obviously :-D) whenever I later learn about it. And I usually wonder why I never even wanted to know about it to begin with. From now onwards, I have decided to put all such "discoveries" in posts labeled - "I did not know that" :-D. Here's the first of them.

I have gone through 5 autumns in the US, have written several poems about the same and told you how much I love it. So recently when I read why autumn leaves are the colours they are, I was really surprised. Because all these years, I never even thought of why they were (I just assumed it was in the nature of the trees). Anyways I'll not keep you waiting any longer. Autumn leaf colours like yellows, golds and oranges are the ACTUAL colours of the leaves. In summer they are masked due to the excessive production of chlorophyll (which turns the leaves green). In winter obviously trees due to the less sunlight, the chlorophyll is gradually stopped and hence the actual colour of leaves shine through. But in case of reds, pinks and purples, its even more interesting. These happen usually in trees that produce lots of sugars - in winter they need to suck all that sugar from the leaves and hence red pigments are produced to accomplish the same. So the red pigments don't actually exist throughout the year :).




More details with all the technical terms of the pigments here in Wikipedia :).