Deducing patterns in the Melakartha system: An amateur’s view – Part 2: Examples

Continued from Part 1….

Let’s take a couple of ragams as examples and try to deduce their position in the Melakartha scheme by applying the rules outlined in Part 1 of this post.

Once again, this method to identify ragams is only partially adequate, as the raga bhavam/lakshanam is also crucial along with the underlying notes to accurately identify any given ragam. Learning the bhavam/lakshanam of a particular ragam can only be achieved by listening to several renditions of that ragam by different performers (vocal/instrumental) over several years and slowly refining our thought process.

Deducing patterns in the Melakartha system: An amateur’s view – Part 1

A couple of weeks ago, I had the sudden impulse to tabulate all the Melakartha ragams in the hope of better understanding them in terms of the underlying notes and perhaps glean more information from this exercise. I must say, choosing Excel as the tool to do this, has not only helped me gain better understanding, but each new piece of knowledge came to me as one revelation after another, marveling at the sheer genius and simple arithmetic behind the whole system. So, I’m attaching a PDF version — MelakarthaResearch – of the spreadsheet with this post; it’ll help illustrate the ideas I am about to put forth ahead.

2011…a milestone in many ways.

Wow.. I haven’t really even thought what I am going to write in this one, but just felt like the least I could do was login and if my blog still existed. And here I am.

2011 feels like one long train ride or flight that finally ended; I am so tired physically just to have endured all the different goings-on and mentally drained from the ennui of enduring one radical change after another, most of which kneed me in the balls and left me questioning the decisions that I had taken to get me to this point in my life. I guess I had so much going on had so many experiences to write about in this space.. and that was exactly the problem in and of itself..

Anyway, things are slowly starting to look up as the new year has rolled in… very slowly nonetheless.

There you have it my dear blog.. I have missed you in the last year and hope to come here and bring my old self back in the days to come.

Happy New Year to you and I.

What If – Heath Ledger

For months the hoopla surrounding the now legendary Heath Ledger was the popular news item on possibly every news/media website. The articles written said a lot of things, but one thing struck me as the common vein…and it struck me only recently, as I watched Doug Stanhope’s standup show. He was talking about how people generally say that when somebody dies really young (numerically), that the deceased person had so much to offer the world, so much promise, so much potential, stuff like that. To this, Doug said something like “What if that person was outta shit?”… Meaning, what if at the time of dying the supposedly God-gifted-uber-talented person had already reached the pinnacle of his talent?

I thought about this and one person immediately came to mind. Heath Ledger. So, I presented the theory to my wife, and she seemed to agree. My theory follows:

What if, after acing the Joker character in The Dark Knight, Heath Ledger would have thought to himself, “Gosh! I guess my performance in this movie has turned out to be possibly my best so far”. Assuming he was using drugs and was perhaps mentally unstable (which may explain his creepy ‘performance’), he would have thought that it would be impossible to perform any better in any forth coming movie, no matter how promising the script or how favourable any of the several circumstances were. Then in a flash, it would have probably occurred to him, that he would want to be remembered and idolized as The Joker. So, he ODed and ended his life.

OR he just felt repulsed after having broken his back on a mountain with Jake Gyllenhaal.

Then again, this is just my theory.

Drawing blanks…

The last few months have been a whirlwind of changes and activity on the domestic and the so called professional front. I had a lot to talk and rant about but just couldn’t turn to my trusted friend here to pour out my thoughts, for reasons unbeknownst to me.

I just logged in here and was reading some of my old posts and noticed how my thought processes have changed over the years, and how I have become much more articulate than I was back in college.

Must start posting more often; I miss this aspect of my life.. don’t know if that’s a good or a bad thing. heh.

Nine years…

How much have I changed? Have I actually “matured” in the conventional sense of the word? What have I given up? What have I gained? Do I miss home? What do I miss most about home? Has my overall personality improved and how?

…are some of the questions that race through my mind when I think back to 17/08/2001.

I do have answers to some… and some of the other questions are transient and they are very quickly replaced by others…

Overall, it has been a fun ride so far.. looking forward to the challenges that life has around the corner for me.

How I met my sole-mate

This post is about how I learnt a lot of things about myself and things in general, recently.

I recently discovered that I have flat feet.. and as that very basic fact registered itself there was another little discovery that was embedding itself onto my brain. That, was the fact that I learnt that there is actually a ‘condition’ called flat feet. The word condition is obviously used very loosely.

The above facts were gleaned from severe heel pain resulting from walking around New York city for a couple days wearing the wrong shoes. Curious fact #3: There are some shoes which could actually be the wrong ones for a given person. I discovered this after I switched to sandals on day 3 of our trip. This is perhaps the only time I could say, if there is pain, there will almost certainly be no gain.

Before now, I used to think that one could just walk into a shoe store and pick up a nice pair of relatively comfortable looking (and feeling) shoes, when they are on a 50% sale…and I was doing that until recently. Owing to fact #1 (I have flat feet), it seems that the last pair of shoes that I owned were so not the right ones for me. So we set out to find me the perfect pair of shoes (didn’t mean to sound like Cinderella, but unfortunately this is all I could come up with using my limited writing skills) and after trying what seemed like about 20-25 different pairs, we finally found my sole mate.

After the elaborate sole searching, it seems that New Balance is the only brand of shoes that fits me well, and the excruciating heel pain brought about by the various shoes I owned earlier is no longer there.